Towards the end of Live a Little, one of its two main characters says: ‘I’m past the age of waiting for something to go wrong. It already has.’ And we know what has, because some 200 pages earlier we have seen the man as a young boy, just before the second world war, pulling his mother’s underwear out of the laundry basket. Here is how the moment, and its repercussions, are described: ‘He climbed into his mother’s bloomers and tumbled into hell.’
Let’s pause to consider the comic elegance and precision of that sentence. I think it’s fair to say that only Howard Jacobson could have written it, and not just because of the subject matter (I can’t help feeling that he’s not the first Jacobson character to have done this; there is at least a sense of inevitability that one of them, one day, would). Just look at the way he makes the English language dance for us, those Ls, those Bs, those BLs.
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