Kalooki Nights [Hardcover]

I'm a long-time fan of Howard Jacobson's and have enjoyed his last four novels: No More Mister Nice Guy, The Mighty Walzer, Who's Sorry Now? and The Making of Henry. So when Kalooki Nights was published and seemed to achieve a sort of critical consensus in the papers (see the reviews extracted above, as well as A.C. Grayling's extraordinary eulogy in The Times: "it is, to state plainly, a work of genius"), I couldn't wait to read it. Then it was longlisted for the Booker Prize last week, and quickly was tipped for the shortlist.

So it gives me no pleasure at all to say that I have given up on Kalooki Nights at about the one-third mark (page 150). Even by Jacobson's discursive, rambling standards it really is toweringly random and in the end the critic I most agreed with is Michael Moorcock who said "Jacobson is a great anecdotalist but a lousy storyteller." Now anyone who reads Jacobson knows that the plot is not the point: but even so. There is less a story than an exploration around a story: specifically, the narrator Maxie Glickman trying to discover why his childhood friend Manny Washinsky gassed both his own parents in their bed. The cultural background, if you hadn't guessed by the names, is Jewish, or Jewish squared: as Jacobson himself said, "it's the most Jewish novel ever written by anyone anywhere." This will be familiar to anyone who's read any of Jacobson's other novels (particularly the semi-autobiographical coming of age story The Mighty Walzer), and here we have the added colour of the big Jewish storyline of the 20th century - the Holocaust.

Sadly for me Jacobson's black humour and tangential style didn't work here the way it has in his other books, and I'm afraid I found Kalooki Nights tiresome almost from the outset: which can't be a good sign. Jacobson is still excellent on families, and still even better on capturing on the page the erotic allure of an older woman, but the book never really took off for me. His previous novel, The Making of Henry, had a terrific 30-page opening scene which gave the reader enough momentum to push through the occasional longueurs afterwards, but Kalooki Nights begins as it goes on: in bits, back and forward, here and there, never picking up speed. Can a book be simultaneously very well written and extremely dull? Well, the evidence of Joyce, Proust, Beckett and Bellow is that yes it can, and indeed can go on to be considered a classic too. So good luck to Jacobson with that: perhaps it's more Nobel (ie difficult and unrewarding) than Booker.

If Kalooki Nights gets onto the Booker shortlist then (a) it can only be as a lifetime-achievement type prize, a little like Ian McEwan's win for the middling Amsterdam, and (b) a lot of people who buy it as their first Jacobson will be put off him for good. Better to begin with No More Mister Nice Guy (a brilliantly funny sex comedy) or Who's Sorry Now? (which was longlisted for the Booker in 2002, should have got further, and didn't).

Kalooki Nights is a loosely biographical story of Maxie Glickman, a post-war Mancunian Jew.

The central theme seems to centre around victimhood and minority identity when the witchhunt moves elsewhere. Maxie and his schoolfriends soon learn deep anger at the treatment of the Jews in the war and exert enormous energy hating the war criminals. To justify their anger at events they never witnessed, they hunt for antisemitism in all around them. When they don't succeed, they seem to annoy others in order to provike reactions that can be seen as anti-semitism. This is exemplified in Maxies choice of wives and girlfriends, most of whom are anodyne at best but provoked into reaction against Maxie's constant self-pity and reference back to Jewsih themes. There is an amusing contrast on display in the form of Maxie's sister's man - an Irishman (sorry, the name escapes me), who is very eager to learn Jewish ways and frustrated when he never quite succeeds.

This is an interesting premise - how do members of an oppressed minority react when the oppression stops. Do members integrate with the whole, as some characters do; or do they continue to act the role of the victim, becoming increasingly frustrated as sympathy evaporates? But the premise might have been brought to denouement in half the number of pages. Although Kalooki Nights did have moments of humour in the early encounters, it became repetitive and dull. Not even the intrigue about Maxie's friend Manny (who had gassed his parents) was enough to sustain interest. I did read on to the bitter end (and there was much bitterness to be got through in the process), but I'm not sure it repaid the effort.

Other reviewers of the book appear to have had a similar reaction to mine--this book is just too long. Like Zadie Smith's rambling and unfocused On Beauty, Kalooki Nights is another example of an author in desperate need of an editor. The book might have been far more interesting if 200 or so pages were knocked off it. There is always a lovely edge of anger and frustration in Jacobson's characters, but for some reason Maxie's self-loathing is less interesting than previous Jacobson creations and his expressions of it are so repetitive that the edge is worn off long before you get to the end of the book. Manny's story on the surface is an intriguing and potentially offensive one, but it somehow fails to be as subversive as one would assume it to be. Jonathan Safran Foer's comparison of Jacobson to Phillip Roth on the back cover is ridiculous: Roth's recent work seethes and rages with a frightening intensity, whilst his earlier work is sharply self-loathing and precise (i.e not 500 pages). I always have thought of Jacobson as a very different sort of writer--his characters express intense frustrations in a more subtly comic way than in great intense bursts. I think Kalooki Nights was meant to be a "big" book in terms of its subject matter, but in some ways it is only a big book in terms of the number of pages.