KCan one seriously die from not writing a novel? He recently revealed that he had to live with this fear for decades. He knew from an early age that he wanted to be a novelist. Ever since he was a student in Cambridge, he calculated the age at which his better-known colleagues published their debuts: Dickens and Tolstoy at 24, Dostoyevsky at 25, and so on. The pressure then increased, as did the concern for his future well-being, when these years of his life had long passed without his own work coming into sight. In fact, that was to last until the author was 41 – it’s hard to imagine the agony he must have endured by then.
He spent his ordeal with lousy teaching jobs in the middle English provinces, because if you don’t produce literature, you have to teach it to unwilling students instead. When he was in his mid-thirties, his wife asked him what his unwritten novel was supposed to be about. “About failure,” he answered her. “Of disappointment, humiliation, frustration, animosity, envy, senselessness.” That was to become the theme of his life. Two dozen books later, including several award-winning ones, it can probably also be called his surest secret of success.
Bitter, but relentlessly funny
His main characters are called, for example, Sefton Goldberg, Leon Forelock, Oliver Walzer or Samuel Finkler, but almost all of them are doppelgangers of their creator, failures who constantly have to gain their zest for life and courage to survive from existential stumbling. Whether in his debut novel from 1983 about a frustrated literature lecturer or in the most important novel to date, “The Finkler Question” about the everyday absurdities of contemporary Jewish existence, which earned him the Booker Prize in 2010, he has always understood how to elevate personal problems to general neurotic sensitivities and to tell with abysmal humor. This makes his stories just as irresistible as they are entertaining, for all the bitterness they often deal with: they are bursting with merciless comedy and allow us to recognize the inadequacy of the world primarily as a problem of style.
Jacobson once said he would rather be the Jewish Jane Austen than the English Philip Roth. The comment is aimed at the kind of social and contemporary novel that is called “novel of manners” in English, whereby these manners are of course always cultivated in Jane Austen’s company, but are usually exceptionally bad in his, which must be due to the bad times these days, and especially sex. In his desperate obsession with this topic, he could therefore also be called the Woody Allen of Manchester.
There, in post-war Manchester, he grew up as the son of Jewish émigrés who were keen to put their traumatic past in the Soviet Union behind them. He talks about this very movingly in his memoirs “Mother’s Son”, which he published in March. His mother encouraged him to love literature at an early age. The father, on the other hand, an upholsterer, businessman, taxi driver and project manager who reliably failed, had not read a single novel in his life and actually only ever wanted to be a magician. The son wonderfully combined the passions of both parents and, as can be seen from today’s perspective, fulfilled them. As his alter ego from the novel “Im Zoo” said ten years ago, the impulse to become a writer is always an impulse to change the circumstances of one’s own childhood. On the occasion of Howard Jacobson’s 80th birthday, which he is celebrating today, we can congratulate him full of gratitude for reliably conjuring up so much literary happiness out of sheer failure. TOBIAS DÖRING
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