The Making of Henry
Howard Jacobson Jonathan Cape, 340pp, 12.99
ISBN 0224073524
Howard Jacobson gets funnier and more exhilarating with each new novel. Having once been seen as inhabiting the same fictional terrain as David Lodge and Malcolm Bradbury, he now more often gets thought of as an English Philip Roth. The comparison comes to mind early in his new novel, when the hero, Henry Nagel, a failed literature lecturer, recalls being introduced to the great American authors:
"In America the Jews had taken on a version of the national identity, had made the American cause their own, had even shaped it, sometimes dangerously - tempting fate, risking a backlash - in their own image. Not in England, not in Manchester, not on the Pennines. Yes, they were dutiful citizens; they paid their taxes, fought in wars, performed charitable deeds, gave service to the community, but only for the right, at last, to be left alone to notice nothing."
Assimilated Henry actually notices everything, particularly the details of his own disastrous life. He is retired - a condition that, in his case, merges with semi-redundancy, quasi-dismissal and complete ignominy. His career as a lecturer at a technological college in the Pennines has been spectacularly downwardly mobile. Having never managed to get to grips with the discourses of feminism and literary theory, and without even a proper PhD to his name, Henry, both professionally and personally, has become horribly marginalised.
But now his fortunes unexpectedly revive. He finds he has inherited a flat in St John's Wood, London, which appears to have belonged to his philandering father. Henry moves into this handsome apartment and embarks on a highly agreeable affair with a fortysomething patisserie waitress, whose work, he feels, pleasingly echoes his own mother's interest in cake decoration. The flat was presumably the scene of his father's assignations. Sleeping in this forbidden and mysterious place causes Henry to brood about his childhood and his errant dad, Izzi Nagel, a children's entertainer and fire-eater who regularly reduced the garden to a scorched brown gloaming while rehearsing his act.
Henry's memories intensify as the novel progresses. With the prospect of death looming, it is as if the whole of his adulthood dwindles to nothing, leaving only old age and childhood side by side. He recalls the early drama of his home life, a precocious sexual encounter with one of his mother's relatives, and his experiences at school. In particular, he remembers a bullying best friend called "Hovis" Belkin, whose subsequent success as a Hollywood producer planted a seed of envy in Henry's heart. The novel's mode is not all static recherche, however. Henry's lost time turns out to be something that he did not fully understand. New discoveries are made, and accommodations reached.
The comparisons with Roth are in many ways unfortunate; Jacobson's writing does not display any of the American's rage. In The Making of Henry, there are no big reckonings or grand showdowns, only an extraordinary - and implausibly fortuitous - encounter with Belkin's son, whom the dazed Henry initially mistakes for his old friend. But the writing, as always with Jacobson, is fluent and seductive and funny. The narrative effortlessly straddles past and present, and the de-scriptions of Izzi Nagel conducting his improbable amour in a hotel, or entrancing a Liverpool thieves' kitchen with his wildly unsafe pyrotechnic act, are hilarious and unexpectedly moving.
Peter Bradshaw's novel Dr Sweet and His Daughter is published by Picador
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