That Howard Jacobson’s win is long overdue is pretty much undeniable: until Tuesday night he looked set to challenge Beryl Bainbridge for the unenviable record of most frequent Booker bridesmaid. But this certainty will go in tandem for many of his fans with the suspicion that, like Margaret Atwood and Ian McEwan before him, he didn’t break the jinx with his best novel. Many see his real triumph as 2006’s Kalooki Nights, which didn’t make the short list.
The Finkler Question shows Jacobson at his most splenetic and most monofocal. His subject is Jewishness, and the lenses through which he observes it belong to an aging goy, an arts producer and failed romantic, who finds himself upstaged culturally and in affairs of the heart when his two Jewish best friends are widowed. So begins Treslove’s project to prove himself more Jewish than the Jews — an enterprise which takes him into various cultural truisms, from humor to food to circumcision.
It is a victory for that most overlooked genre on literary prize lists, the comic novel.
However, not everyone has seen the funny side. In a blog earlier this month on the Guardian books Web site, Jonathan Beckmann said The Finkler Question “flattered” critics into thinking it had something interesting to say about Jewishness when in fact it is reliant on cliche.
But reviewing it for the Guardian, Alex Clark wrote: “In its insistent interrogation of Jewishness — from the exploration of the relationship between the perpetrators of violence and hatred and their victims, to the idea of the individual at once in opposition to and in love with his or her culture — it is by turns breezily open and thought-provokingly opaque, and consistently wrong foots the reader.”
The final judgment will lie with the many readers who have yet to discover the novel, which has trailed behind the popular shortlist favorites, Room and The Long Song, in sales terms. Three interested parties will be happy with the judges’ answer to the Finkler question: first is Jacobson’s publisher Bloomsbury, which snatched him from his long-term publisher Jonathan Cape for this novel. The second are the bookies, who put him near the bottom in the odds. And the third is Jacobson himself, who has waited so long for this moment.
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