Trump, the emptiest mind

Howard Jacobson awoke to the news of Trump’s victory in November. He had no newspaper column so, what could he do? Write a novel, said his wife, and he did, in six weeks. It is called Pussy, and it is a short and horrifying hypothetical biography of Donald Trump, now an infant prince called Fracassus, born into a noble family of property developers. Fracassus hates words. He hates women. He tweets. Jacobson throws every weapon — every word — he has into Pussy. He is the voice of the metropolitan liberal elite emitting a death rattle, and that is a grave calling.

I have loved Jacobson since he wrote this, in 2011, about the ‘new’ anti–Semitism: ‘Thus are Jews doubly damned: to the Holocaust itself and to the moral wasteland of having found no humanising redemption in its horrors.’ If I love his journalism, I cannot finish his novels because — and this is a very Jewish criticism — they are too evocative.