Kalooki Nights
Howard Jacobson Jonathan Cape, 472pp, £17.99
ISBN 0224078658
Howard Jacobson is making the emotional geography of his growing up Jewish in Manchester every bit as recognisable as the formative years of Philip Roth in New Jersey or Saul Bellow in Chicago. Kalooki Nights, the most brilliantly ambitious (and ambitiously brilliant) of his eight novels, is set in the Manc suburb of Crumpsall Park, though the story it eventually tells - of obsessional love, and murder - might have come, as he writes, from the pages of Genesis, "among the sons of Noah and the daughters of Lot".
It is related in the voice of Max Glickman, a failing cartoonist and three-times failed husband. He starts as he means to go on, grabbing you by the extremities: "Once when no one was buying my cartoons I took a job ripping off the Tom of Finland books for an unscrupulous pirate publisher of gay eroticism." Though he was brought up in an atheist house - his one-time boxing champion father believing only in trade unionism and pugilism, his mother living only for the kalooki evenings (a form of gin rummy) she shares with her friends - Glickman is freighted with his Jewishness, tortured as a child by "five thousand years of suffering", acting out Nazi torture and gas chambers with his Orthodox friend Manny in an abandoned bomb shelter in the park.
In adult life Glickman has done everything he can to escape this "Jew, Jew, Jew" burden. He has married out of the religion twice, to Zoë and Chloë (he believes himself unable to fall in love with anyone without an umlaut), and he has made a living drawing wicked cartoon histories of Jewish pain. Both marriages have failed, however, because passion has turned quickly to pogrom; Zoë and Chloë have become anti-Semites in the bedroom in scenes of shock- comedy that only Jacobson could get away with (Glickman looks at the palm of Chloë's hand at one point and sees "no warm accommodating pouches of skin, no life or love lines, just a vexed criss-cross of Judaeophobia like the railway tracks going in and out of Auschwitz"). Such horrors are exacerbated by a mother-in-law who nags him to get a Mercedes and, when he compromises on a Volkswagen, presents him with a nodding rabbi to hang in the back window.
The voice of the cartoonist is perfect for Jacobson: scabrous, funny, cruel and sentimental by turns, he writes with the raw acuity of a Hogarth or a Robert Crumb. At one point in the book Glickman approvingly quotes Harvey Kurtzman of Mad magazine: "The style I developed was necessarily thoughtful under a rowdy surface." Jacobson also enjoys that dichotomy to the full: his surfaces are perpetually "rowdy", the language full of life, sometimes chaotic with reference, but the characteristic fierce intelligence is never far from them.
When Glickman meets his old friend Manny again, out of prison after murdering his parents - he gassed them in their bedroom - he embarks on a journey of self-discovery that takes in all of his caricaturist's anger against the Orthodox community, and a complex, always comic angle on all the facts of his Jewish life. It is a story that risks wild shifts in tone: few novelists would contemplate punctuating an account of marital strife with a nagging fantasy about a concentration camp inmate dreaming of being abused by the "Witch of Buchenwald", Ilse Koch. Jacobson, in the voice of Glickman, does this and much more.
The real compulsion of this novel, however, is that he allies this voice to a powerful love story - Manny's brother becomes besotted with a local girl of German parentage - and a black kind of whodunnit: though we know from the outset that Manny Washinsky is a murderer, we wait 400 pages to discover exactly why. Jacobson manages to keep both of these story engines revving while never letting up on his affectionate, highly evocative detailing of the smaller family dramas that provide no end of light relief. In his account of the death of Glickman's father he also manages great pathos, as the determinedly hard-headed Mancunian Jew retreats into Yiddish when cradling his daughter in his arms: "Shaineh-maidel [beautiful girl]."
Jacobson has often been caricatured as a writer passed by for the major literary awards. Oddly hamstrung by his high-profile alternative career as a TV critic, he is not taken as seriously as his effortless comedy demands. You have the sense, however, with Kalooki Nights, that this most garrulous and rascally of novelists feels himself to be very much at the height of his powers, fully prepared to take on all comers. If this one does not make a shortlist or two, it will be a cruel joke indeed.
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