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. Reading The Finkler Question — for which he won the Booker Prize in 2010 — made me want to hit my father with a spade.

In person, Jacobson isn’t noisy. His novels, which he ‘stole from his own life’ take it all, and leave him courteous and calm — except when he is talking about Trump, ‘the’ social media and Brexit. He is 75, but he looks younger. He speaks in a low Mancunian growl.

Jacobson is a child of two warring Jewish worlds, which make, by my count, three civilisations to be torn between, and the potential for three separate alienations. He has mined them all. ‘We are all our parents’ battlegrounds,’ he says. ‘Mine was very stark because my dad was unlettered, extraverted, vivacious.’ His father’s family were Ukrainian Jews: ‘The rabbis who did somersaults, the charismatics.’ He was a market trader, and a children’s magician: ‘Not a very good magician.