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Amazon.co.uk Review
Who’s Sorry Now? centres on Marvin Kreitman, a middle-aged Jewish Lothario, a man with a "nostalgic affection for many of the old discredited categories of masculine swagger". He was once a promising young academic but somehow ended up following in the footsteps of his father--a curmudgeon who hawked purses at a street market in Balham. Now the owner of a thriving leather goods business, Kreitman has a wife and two grown-up children, an elegant house in south London and a string of mistresses. Each week he meets his old university friend Charlie Merriweather for a Chinese meal in Soho. Charlie is a big, puppy dog of a man, brutalised by his public schooling but seemingly (if a little soppily) devoted to his wife and family. The Merriweathers enjoy "nice sex" and write children’s books. To indulge in a vaguely pertinent culinary metaphor, Charlie is sweet to Marvin’s sour. However, on this particular day Charlie suggests that they should swap wives--so far so 70s sitcom. Before Marvin can persuade Charlie against the idea, Nyman, a muscle-toned cyclist, runs him down in the street. Nyman is the novel’s malevolent force. Following the crash, this apparent nobody, an enigmatic wannabe television star, weasels his way into their lives and triggers a series of unexpected couplings, leaving Kreitman’s daughter to enquire at one point: "Who’s doing what to whom this time?"
Jacobson examines sexual obsession and infidelity in ribald, if poignant detail. However, it is his exploration of the painful scars left by family life that make this book both riveting and, certainly at its end, disturbing. Although it is littered with wonderfully amusing barbs against the cult of personality, installation art and even backpacker yarn The Beach, there is probably more tragedy than comedy in this remarkable novel.--Travis Elborough --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
"There are few novelists today who can imbue the trifles of life with such poetry." -- "Independent"
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Charlie is faithful, if not uxorious - he has never slept with a woman other than his wife, but the question of what it would be like nags at him constantly. The reason it nags at him is because Kreitman (and this anomaly is never resolved in the book - Kreitman always referred to by surname, Charlie by first name, perhaps to make the one "good" and the other "bad") has five mistresses, and appears to be having the time of his life. Or is he? The two friends have never adequately discuss the relative merits of fidelity and promiscuity; indeed Charlie feels they have been spending the last twenty years avoiding the issue. And so he suggests they swap roles.
Don't get excited. It's not "Run for Your Wife!" If it's filthy sex and three-in-a-bed romps you're after, go back to No More Mister Nice Guy (which does it all, and more, hilariously and brilliantly). Who's Sorry Now?, as the title suggests, is an altogether more thoughtful piece, and the plot itself - such as it is - takes place almost in the background. The surface, meanwhile, is populated richly and densely with the husbands' and wives' - and their children's - thoughts and feelings and dialogues and interactions. In that sense it's an old-fashioned novel, concerned with the inner life and moral conundrums - but then Jacobson makes it clear as early as page 6 that he has no truck with the modish and depthless ("if these days ... but to hell with these days"). Instead he keeps the reader interested by his impeccable style and aplomb - there is literally not a bad sentence, not a word out of place, in the whole 326 pages - and a dark wit that surfaces less frequently than in his earlier books, but is all the more unforced and welcome for it.
Howard Jacobson is a great writer who deserves to be as highly praised as those American big boys whom I can now see he resembles - the Roths, the Updikes, the Bellows - but, more importantly, deserves to be much more widely read than they. The best way for that to happen is for Who's Sorry Now? to win its place on the shortlist and to go on to win the Prize. Are you reading this, Booker Prize panel? (If you're reading this after Who's Sorry Now? failed even to leap the first hurdle, then think of this review as a missive from a more hopeful age. Look, I was wrong - just let it go, will you?)
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