Missing the Joke

Believing that his female assailant whispered “You Jew” into his ear,Treslove is taken over by the idea of Jewishness. Jewish humour,Jewish introspection,Jewish neurotica — he assimilates everything through this new lens. Between Treslove’s nose-pressed-to-the-glass perspective,Libor’s long view of the century and Finkler’s status as an ASHamed Jew who denounces Israeli actions,the novel covers the spectrum. While Libor reverently turns to talk of “Isrrrae”,as if he couldn’t bring himself to pronounce it fully,Finkler “spits out words like Zionist and… Knesset as though they were curses”. The Finkler Question goes on to catalogue all the usual tedious disputes about Israel’s destiny,Zionism and anti-Semitism.

None of the novel’s principal actors,except Libor,has any dimension.Treslove and Finkler are silly binaries,stick-figure characters,clusters of opposing attributes. Treslove,we are told repeatedly,is indeterminate in every way. He is not good-looking as much as he “resembles good-looking people”. His degree is a stew of several “arts-related indisciplines”,from archaeology to concrete poetry,stage-set and design,and the Russian short story.

Finkler,meanwhile,strides to success,with his spiky-sexy wife,his TV show and his fluffy philosophy bestsellers,with titles like “The Existentialist in the Kitchen” and “The Little Book of Household Stoicism”. He is oblivious to failure,while Treslove is passive,uncertain,awaiting something he doesn’t even know how to recognise.

Treslove’s overdeveloped sense of pathos is meant to be hilarious: with an operatic sense of romance,he is looking for a pallid woman who will ultimately die in his arms,and he keeps messing up. As schoolboys,when Treslove is told by a fortune-teller to await a woman named Juno,he confides in Finkler. His “J’you know Juno” is mockingly mangled into “D’Jew know Jewno” by Finkler — which is inexplicably held up as evidence of his unique linguistic brilliance.

I’m mystified by the near-unanimity with which Jacobson has been anointed the supreme chronicler of British Jewishness,even “our funniest living writer”. Though wholly different,it’s not much better than Zadie Smith’s The Autograph Man,which madly tabulated people and things and gestures as “fundamentally Jewish” or “fundamentally goyish”. While that was dismissed as superficial preening,The Finkler Question has been beatified by the Booker.

While it is both droll and moving in certain moments (like Libor’s relationship with his wife Malkie),the novel is undone by the expectations created by its own bombastic blurb: “a story of exclusion and belonging,justice and love,ageing,wisdom and humanity.”