The Finkler Question
by Howard Jacobson
Summary
Julian Treslove is a former BBC radio producer of no particular distinction who makes his living as a celebrity lookalike, resembling nobody in particular. His old schoolfriend Sam Finkler is a wealthy pop philosopher with a television career. Their former teacher Libor Sevcik is a Czech emigre nearing ninety. Finkler and Libor have both recently been widowed. Treslove has never been married and rather envies them the grief.
Walking home from dinner one night Treslove is mugged by a woman who says something he half hears as an antisemitic slur, and he becomes convinced that he is, or ought to be, Jewish. What follows is a comedy about a man trying to convert himself into an identity, set against Finkler's involvement with a group of prominent Jews publicly ashamed of Israel.
Jacobson is very funny and completely serious at the same time, which is the difficult trick this book pulls off. The jokes are constant and the subject underneath them is grief, envy and what antisemitism looks like in polite British company.
Some readers find Treslove too foolish to carry it and the argument too weighted. Others find it the sharpest British comic novel in decades. It helps to arrive willing to be provoked.
This is a novel of conversation rather than event, and almost nothing happens in it that could be called a plot. Come for the talk, which is superb, and for a comic writer working at the top of his range on a subject he refuses to handle gently.
Historical Context & Significance
The Finkler Question won the Booker Prize in 2010 and was reported everywhere as the first unashamedly comic novel to take it in the prize's forty two year history, the nearest precedent being Kingsley Amis's The Old Devils in 1986.
That framing mattered to Howard Jacobson, who had spent a career being described as the English Philip Roth and complaining that comic novels were treated as a lesser form. He was sixty eight and had never previously been shortlisted.
The prize administrator described it as a novel about love, loss and male friendship that asks what it means to be Jewish now, and the book's treatment of anti Zionism and antisemitism among British intellectuals guaranteed it an argumentative reception that has not entirely settled since.