Plus: Check out Book Beast, for more news on hot titles and authors and excerpts from the latest books. Perhaps the most pleasing thing of all is that Jacobson's back catalogue, for so long overlooked, might be due for a seismic reevaluation. From No More Mr Nice Guy (about the dark side of the masculine psyche) to The Mighty Walzer (about ping pong in the north of England), Jacobson's capacity to explore the minutiae of the human condition while attending to the metaphysics of human existence is without contemporary peer. The Finkler Question is a fine and endlessly satisfying novel, and thoroughly deserving of the Booker. It has that depth of cleverness and subtlety and human understanding in it. "Actually it's a book which is much cleverer and more complicated. "It would be very easy to characterize a book we have called comic as being somehow relentlessly middlebrow and easy-peasy," Motion said. Sir Andrew Motion, the chairman of the judges, said that comedy's place in society had changed.
Those who have championed Jacobson over the years will perceive this year's award as a vindication, not least because the judges were explicit that Jacobson's victory was about challenging the bias against literary humor. Although The Finkler Question is by no means a straightforward comic novel, it once again demonstrates Jacobson's mastery of the form. In the right hands, comedy is a powerful rhetorical device, subverting assumptions and probing biases. This, of course, is a depressingly lazy perspective. Critics of a certain mindset seem to abhor wit, supposing that it is indicative of superficiality and insufficient moral seriousness.
Jacobson's leitmotif, and the oft-cited reason for why he has hitherto been snubbed by those who hand out literary baubles, is his predilection for comedy. Jacobson's capacity to explore the minutiae of the human condition while attending to the metaphysics of human existence is without contemporary peer. The central preoccupation is with the nature of modern Jewishness, a common Jacobson theme, but over the course of the book this flays into a powerful and, at times, haunting examination of friendship, love, and loss. Like the others, it is a work of greatness. The Finkler Question, a clever, canny, textured, subtle, and humane novel exploring the friendship of three ageing male friends, is Jacobson's 11th novel. It feels as if the British novel has shifted on its axis.
Howard Jacobson, a novelist who has been consistently overlooked by the British literary establishment, has landed the big one.
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