The Finkler Question

Publishers Weekly

Starred Review.

Winner of the 2010 Man Booker Prize, Jacobson's wry, devastating novel examines the complexities of identity and belonging, love, and grief through the lens of contemporary Judaism. Julian Treslove, a former BBC producer who works as a celebrity double, feels out of sync with his longtime friend and sometimes rival Sam Finkler, a popular author of philosophy-themed self-help books and a rabidly anti-Zionist Jewish scholar. The two have reconnected with their elderly professor, Libor Sevcik, following the deaths of Finkler and Libor's wives, leaving Treslove-the bachelor Gentile-even more out of the loop. But after Treslove is mugged-the crime has possible anti-Semitic overtones-he becomes obsessed with what it means to be Jewish, or "a Finkler." Jacobson brilliantly contrasts Treslove's search for a Jewish identity-through food, spurts of research, sex with Jewish women-with Finkler's thorny relationship with his Jewish heritage and fellow Jews. Libor, meanwhile, struggles to find his footing after his wife's death, the intense love he felt for her reminding Treslove of the belonging he so craves. Jacobson's prose is effortless-witty when it needs to be, heartbreaking where it counts-and the Jewish question becomes a metaphor without ever being overdone.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

From the Publisher

Winner of the 2010 Man Booker Prize

 

“Like all of [Jacobson’s] work, The Finkler Question has a kind of energy that you have to look at through your fingers, like an eclipse. As the brightness of his brilliance is hard to look at, so is the darkness of his humor. I don't know a funnier writer alive.”—Jonathan Safran Foer

 

"Like Phillip Roth, to whom he is fairly compared, Howard Jacobson is a magnificent prose stylist who is often at his most serious when he is being uproariously funny. This novel, which won the Man Booker Prize this year, is both a send-up of some very silly people, and an examination of Jewish identity in relation to rising tides of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. I don't think you have to be Jewish to find it funny, touching, and troubling.”—Jacob Weisberg, Slate, "Best Books of 2010"

 

“Mr. Jacobson doesn’t just summon [Philip] Roth; he summons Roth at Roth’s best. This prizewinning book is a riotous morass of jokes and worries about Jewish identity, though it is by no means too myopic to be enjoyed by the wider world. It helps that Mr. Jacobson’s comic sensibility suggests Woody Allen’s, that his powers of cultural observation are so keen, and that influences as surprising as Lewis Carroll shape this book… Even in its darkest moments The Finkler Question offers many examples of… the most pernicious and authentic strain of Jewish humor: the kind that’s so real it isn’t funny at all.”—New York Times

 

“A striking novel and a subtle one… The Finkler Question has all the qualities we expect from Mr. Jacobson—especially a mordant wit, sometimes as acrid as it is exuberant. He has been called the English Philip Roth, and it is true that the two authors have in common a white-hot indignation, at anti-Semitism and much else... With The Finkler Question, Mr. Jacobson has managed to channel his themes and his characters' emotions... with nuance, insight and, yes, laughter.”—Wall Street Journal, Best Books of 2010

“The Finkler Question tackles an uncomfortable issue [Jewish identity] with satire that is so biting, so pointed, that it pulls you along for 300 pages and leaves a battlefield of sacred cows in its wake… Like all great Jewish art… it is Jacobson’s use of the Jewish experience to explain the greater human one that sets it apart…It’s a must read, no matter what your background.”—National Public Radio

“Rare is a work of fiction that takes on the most controversial issues facing Jews so directly—and with enough humor, intelligence, and insight—that it changes a reader’s mind or two.  Be warned: The Finkler Question will probably distress you on its way to disarming you.  Can we pay a novel any greater compliment?”—Barnes & Noble Review

“Let’s hope that this recognition for The Finkler Question... gets Jacobson the recognition he deserves—not as a comic novelist, or a Jewish novelist, or a British Philip Roth—but on his own terms.”—New Yorker "Book Bench"

“The Finkler Question, a clever, canny, textured, subtle, and humane novel exploring the friendship of three ageing male friends…is a work of greatness… Although The Finkler Question is by no means a straightforward comic novel, it once again demonstrates Jacobson’s mastery of the form… Jacobson’s capacity to explore the minutiae of the human condition while attending to the metaphysics of human existence is without contemporary peer.”—Daily Beast

"The acrobatic wit and biting humor Jacobson displayed in Kalooki Nights and The Mighty Walzer is honed sharp in The Finkler Question. Masterfully, Jacobson will bury a joke only to knock you out with a punch line 10 pages later. Though undeniably a comic novel, The Finkler Question. is a tragicomedy, centered on a wayward man whose quest for a self serves as a platform for Jacobson to explore the complexities of British Jewish identity…this is a book of big, rich ideas and, if those ideas sometimes take precedent over plot, it's still a joy being on Treslove's journey and inside Jacobson's head." —San Francisco Chronicle

 

“The Finkler Question is often awfully funny, even while it roars its witty rage at the relentless, ever-fracturing insanity of anti-Semitism, which threatens to drive its victims a little crazy, too.  This is, after all, a comedy that begins and ends in grief.”  —Washington Post

“[A] wry, devastating novel… Jacobson’s prose is effortless—witty when it needs to be, heartbreaking where it counts—and the Jewish question becomes a metaphor without ever being overdone.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Jacobson uses Julian’s transformation as a way of examining, often with a mordant wit reminiscent of comedian Larry David’s, what it means to be Jewish. Winner of the 2010 Man Booker Prize, this novel also offers poignant insights into the indignities of aging, the competitiveness of male friendship, and the yearning to belong.” —Booklist

“It is tempting—after reading something as fine as The Finkler Question—not to bother reviewing it in any meaningful sense but simply to urge you to put down this paper and go and buy as many copies as you can carry … Full of wit, warmth, intelligence, human feeling and understanding. It is also beautifully written … Indeed, there’s so much that is first rate in the manner of Jacobson’s delivery that I could write all day on his deployment of language without once mentioning what the book is about.”—Observer (UK)

“Another masterpiece … The Finkler Question is further proof, if any was needed, of Jacobson’s mastery of humor. But above all it is a testament to his ability to describe—perhaps it would be better to say inhabit—the personal and moral worlds of his disparate characters.”—Times (UK)

“Howard Jacobson’s latest holler from the halls of comic genius … The opening chapters of this novel boast some of the wittiest, most poignant and sharply intelligent comic prose in the English language … Jacobson’s brilliance thrives on the risk of riding death to a photo-finish, of writing for broke. Exhilaration all the way.”—Scotsman

“Howard Jacobson [is] a writer able to recognize the humor in almost any situation and a man as expansive as most on the nature of Jewishness.”—Telegraph (UK)

“This charming novel follows many paths of enquiry, not least the present state of Jewish identity in Britain and how it integrates with the Gentile population. Equally important is its exploration of how men share friendship. All of which is played out with Jacobson’s exceptionally funny riffs and happy-sad refrains … Jacobson’s prose is a seamless roll of blissfully melancholic interludes. Almost every page has a quotable, memorable line.”—Independent on Sunday (UK)

“Both an entertaining novel and a humane one.”—Financial Times

“There are some great riffs and skits in The Finkler Question … But at the heart of the book is Julian the wannabe Jew, a wonderful comic creation precisely because he is so tragically touching in his haplessness. The most moving (and funniest) scenes are those in which he and Libor, the widower with nothing more to live for, ruminate on love and Jewishness.”—Sunday Times (UK)

“[A] bleakly funny meditation on loss, belonging and personal identity.”—Daily Mail (UK)

“For some writers a thorough investigation of the situation of British Jews today might do as the subject for a single book. In The Finkler Question it’s combined with his characteristically unsparing—but not unkindly—ruminations on love, aging, death and grief. He also manages his customary—but not easy—trick of fusing all of the above with genuine comedy … No wonder that, as with most of Jacobson’s novels, you finish The Finkler Question feeling both faintly exhausted and richly entertained.”—Sunday Telegraph (UK)

“A terrifying and ambitious novel, full of dangerous shallows and dark, deep water. It takes in the mysteries of male friendship, the relentlessness of grief and the lure of emotional parasitism.”—Guardian (UK)

“The Finkler Question balances precariously a bleak moralizing with life-affirming humor.”—Independent (UK)

“Jacobson writes perceptively about how durable friendships are compounded, in large part, of envy, schadenfreude and betrayal.”—Literary Review (UK)

“The Finkler Question is very funny, utterly original, and addresses a topic of contemporary fascination … The writing is wonderfully mobile, and inventive, and Jacobson’s signature is to be found in every sentence … The Finkler Question is a remarkable work.”—Anthony Julius, Jewish Chronicle

“Jacobson is at the height of his powers … As the men tussle with women and their absence, and their own identities, Jacobson’s wit launches a fusillade of hard-punching aperçus on human nature and its absurdities that only he could have written.”—Metro (UK)

“The Finkler Question, which is as provocative as it is funny, as angry as it is compassionate, offers a moving testimony to a dilemma as ancient as the Old Testament. It also marks another memorable achievement for Jacobson, a writer who never fires blanks and whose dialogue, which reads like an exchange between Sigmund Freud and Woody Allen, races along like a runaway train.”—Herald Scotland

“Here are three men who are in varying ways miserably womanless. This is rich soil for comedy, and Jacobson tills it for every regretful laugh he can muster … Perhaps [Jacobson’s] Leopold Bloom time has come at last.”—Irish Independent

“The Finkler Question is characterized by [Jacobson’s] structuring skill and unsimplifying intelligence—this time picking through the connections and differences, hardly unremarked but given fresh treatment here, between vicariousness and parasitism, and between Jewishness, Judaism and Zionism.”—New Statesman

“Full of caustic moments … that are also, essentially, funny … No matter the book’s themes, the way Jacobson weds humor to seriousness makes it affecting for anyone.”—Jewish Week

 

Library Journal

[star]In tribute to his childhood pal, Samuel Finkler, Julian Treslove, a former BBC arts producer, has always privately thought of Jews as Finklers. Now in late middle age, Treslove and Finkler have remained friends and have also stayed close to their former history teacher and bon vivant, the nonagenarian Libor Sevick, another Jew. After a night out with his two old friends, Treslove is mugged by a female assailant who says something to him that sounds at first like, "Your jewels," but that he later interprets to be, "You Jew." This life-defining moment sparks an identity crisis, one in which Treslove, who has always been the envious outsider, comes to believe he might actually be Jewish. At the same time, Finkler, a widely regarded and well-known philosopher, joins the ranks of a group called "ASHamed," Jews who distance themselves from the Israeli cause in sympathy for the Palestinians. Just as an outbreak of violent anti-Semitic incidents causes Finkler to rethink his alliance with ASHamed, Treslove falls in love with Sevick's niece and becomes deeply immersed in Jewish studies.Verdict The novel's underlying question is: Can you choose to be Jewish or can you choose not to be? This Man Booker Prize nominee is as entertaining as it is provocative and will be essential reading for thoughtful readers on either side of the debate. Highly recommended.—Barbara Love, Kingston Frontenac P.L., Kingston, Ont.

(c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Kirkus Reviews

Elegiac—but also humorous—meditation on life's big questions: life, death, the nature of justice, whether to sleep with a German. The book won the 2010 Man Booker Prize.

Nearing the end of his 60s, Jacobson, who has likened himself to a "Jewish Jane Austen," is a very funny man. His lead character, a London media type named Julian Treslove, is not Jewish, but he might as well be: He has a Woody Allen–size complex of neuroses and worries, and "his life had been one mishap after another." Mugged by a woman who utters a mysterious syllable—"Ju," Treslove thinks—while going through his pockets, he finds himself about as angst-ridden as an angst-ridden person can be. His widower friends Finkler and Libor, great successes in their day, are no pikers in the angst department, though, lonely and full of the usual aches and veys; as Treslove notes, "A man without a wife can be lonely in a big black Mercedes, no matter how many readers he has." The three pass their days together gnawing various questions to the bone, not least whether, in the post-Holocaust days, it is possible to "contemplate having an affair with someone who looked German." (Consensus: No, even if that someone was Marlene Dietrich.) When Libor's great-niece, Hephzibah, sweeps into the picture, Treslove finds himself thinking much more about questions of the heart, even as Finkler, a writer of pop philosophy, is swept away in a flood of "ASHamed Jews" who "were not to blame for anything" but were in the thick of controversy all the same—for, Finkler sighs, the very word "Jew" (was that what Treslove's attacker was saying?) is "a password to madness...One little word with no hiding place for reason in it."Jacobson's gentle tale of urban crises of the soul slowly turns into an examination of anti-Semitism, of what it means to be Jewish in a time when "the Holocaust had become negotiable."

At turns a romp and a disquisition worthy of Maimonides; elegantly written throughout, and with plenty of punchlines too.

Janet Maslin

Mr. Jacobson doesn't just summon [Philip] Roth; he summons Roth at Roth's best. This prizewinning book is a riotous morass of jokes and worries about Jewish identity, though it is by no means too myopic to be enjoyed by the wider world. It helps that Mr. Jacobson's comic sensibility suggests Woody Allen's, that his powers of cultural observation are so keen, and that influences as surprising as Lewis Carroll shape this book.
—The New York Times

Ron Charles

Although there is a plot, The Finkler Question is really a series of tragicomic meditations on one of humanity's most tenacious expressions of malice, which I realize sounds about as much fun as sitting shiva, but Jacobson's unpredictable wit is more likely to clobber you than his pathos. In these pages, he's refined the funny shtick of Kalooki Nights (2007) to produce a more cerebral comedy about the bizarre metastasis of anti-Semitism and the exhausting complications of Zionism.
—The Washington Post

The Barnes & Noble Review

When you begin reading Howard Jacobson's The Finkler Question -- just announced as this year's winner of the Man Booker Prize -- you may worry that you are headed into a polemic disguised as a novel. The characters spend a lot of time talking about Gaza, swastikas, and "never forgetting." As you keep reading, however, the brilliance of the book comes clear: Jacobson is using the novel form precisely in order to help us limn these polarizing issues through the consciousness of a flawed character as an excuse, freeing himself -- and us -- from the conventions of argumentation .

Although strong positions on Israel, Zionism, and anti-Semitism comprise the bulk of this talky book, they are expressed through characters who each, eventually, change their minds. More impressively, behind these characters it is impossible to find any puppet master. You cannot deduce an authorial stance, only evidence of a frighteningly smart and insightful thinker and stylist. Jacobson -- an established British author who has been terribly under-known this side of the pond -- has written a brave book. Even more welcome, he has written a seriously funny one.

Jacobson exploits the non-threatening veneer of a novel -- "it's just a story" -- to make fun of everybody, defusing with an appealing lightness the heady political discussions the characters cannot stop themselves from having. "'I wonder whether we feel nothing,'" says a main character about Jews, "'precisely because we rehearse our feelings on the subject too freely and too often?'" "'Crying Wolfowitz, you mean?'" responds another character, "with a wild laugh."

The novel revolves around Julian Treslove, a former BBC producer turned celebrity look-alike. Treslove is a textbook Romantic: he longs for an Ophelia, a lover who will die young and beautiful, so he can mourn her. His daydreams end this way: "The curtain always came down on Treslove's fantasy of happiness with him crying 'Mimi!' or 'Violetta!' and kissing the cold dead lips a last goodbye that would leave him inconsolable for ever." It's not much of a surprise that Treslove has never married, but has instead been involved with a string of women whose names all begin with "Ju" (or, as he later wonders, "Jew"), the only syllable he could hear a psychic utter when he had his romantic fortunes foretold .

Julian Treslove (or, perhaps, "Jewlian Very Love") was childhood friends with Sam Finkler. Finkler was the first Jew Treslove ever met, and Finkler did not quite live up to the stereotype. Then, "he supposed a Jew would be like the word Jew -- small and dark and beetling." The two develop an intensely homosocial relationship straight from the British school-chums genre, but with a twist. For Treslove, Finkler represents the mysterious, desirable Other; he represents Jews, that is. Hence the novel's title: since he first met his first Jew, Treslove has called all Jews Finklers -- but only to himself, wondering and mulling the age-old question of what it means to be Finkler.

Finkler, meanwhile, grows up to become a hugely successful pop philosopher, writing self-help books such as The Socratic Flirt: How to Reason Your Way into a Better Sex Life. Raised Orthodox, Finkler has fallen away from any faith, and is so anti-Zionist Treslove wonders if he is at heart anti-Semitic. When Finklers's wife, Tyler, a convert, dies young, Finkler mourns -- as Jews always are doing, at least in Treslove's romantic imagination -- but he also feels guilty (perhaps also as Jews are always doing). Finkler was an inconstant, distracted husband, is still a poor father, and spends his nights with zaftig Jewish mistresses or playing online poker. He holds the most outrageous political views in the book, and he is also the least likable member of a cast of characters who, although fascinating, are not always sympathetic. He is the kind of person who, at a restaurant, always asks the waiters for more hot water, "no matter how much hot water had already been brought. It was his way of asserting power, Treslove thought. No doubt Nietzsche, too, ordered more hot water than he needed."

Finkler is also, of course, very funny. Treslove endlessly and unsuccessfully tries to crack the code of Finkler humor. It is all in wordplay, he concludes, but you also have to time the linguistic cleverness correctly. Poor Waspy Julian's jokes are usually met with confused stares.

Treslove and Finkler are also linked by a mutual teacher from their childhood, now recently widowed and bereft, named Libor Sevcik, a Czech who has become, of all things, a celebrity journalist. With this trio of lost, mourning men at the center of the story, Jacobson sets himself a tough task. How will a novel in which these men meet, talk, and fight about Gaza be engaging? Somehow Jacobson makes it work, in no small part because it's funny .

Whenever the three get together, Libor and Finkler debate the state of Israel. Libor always pronounced it, "Isrrrae." Treslove analyzes his pronunciation: "Whenever Libor said the word Israel he sounded the 'r' as though there were three of them and let the 'l' fall away to suggest that the place belonged to the Almighty and he couldn't bring himself fully to pronounce it. Finklers were like that with language, Treslove understood. When they weren't playing with it they were ascribing holy properties to it." Finkler, on the other hand, refuses to pronounce the word at all, calling the country Palestine: he "spit out Israel-associated words like Zionist and Tel Aviv and Knesset as though they were curses."

Treslove mainly listens and envies the witty, headstrong Finklers. After Finkler and Libor become widowers, Treslove is only more jealous: now they have even greater tragic auras! Finkler, in turn, always competes with Treslove, and perhaps wishing for himself a less troubled past, envies Libor his memories of a better marriage, and therefore his greater share of grief.

The action that sets the plot into motion is hilariously inconsequential: Treslove is mugged. The improbable consequence is his decision to convert to Judaism. He learns Yiddish, a language Finkler considers "the lost provincial overexpressiveness" of his Orthodox father. He visits a blogger who is trying to grow his foreskin back to discuss circumcision and sexual pleasure. What was his "Jewish thing" really? asks the Jewish woman he falls in love with. "A search for some identity that came with more inwrought despondence than he could manufacture out of his own gene pool? Did he want the whole fucking Jewish catastrophe?"

With anti-Semitic attacks on the rise in London, Libor also undergoes a change of heart, as all the English Jews find themselves wondering of a swastika here or a smear of bacon grease there, "Was it something or was it nothing?" As the debates migrate from past times or far away places to the streets of the diaspora, the characters all find themselves surprised by their own reactions.

Rare is a work of fiction that takes on the most controversial issues facing Jews so directly -- and with enough humor, intelligence, and insight -- that it changes a reader's mind or two. Be warned: The Finkler Question will probably distress you on its way to disarming you. Can we pay a novel any greater compliment?

--Anne Trubek