Who's Sorry Now [Hardcover]

Howard Jacobson is widely acclaimed as a humorous writer. Who’s Sorry Now? is exceedingly funny but for all the bubbling wit, word play and satirical gibes it is infused with darkness. If his last book, the semi-autobiographical The Mighty Walzer, was Philip Roth’s Portnoy's Complaint relocated to 1950s Manchester, then this is possibly Jacobson's American Pastoral.

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

‘Jacobson’s humour is unashamedly savage and his jokes as sharp as a switch-blade…comic vitriol worthy of Evelyn Waugh.’

‘Jacobson is a great storyteller…unsurpassable.’

‘There are few novelists today who can imbue the trifles of life with such poetry.’

‘Who's Sorry Now? is a rich, unrepentantly funny novel, full of vim and vigour and bolshie cleverness. Its prose pulsates with fresh images.'

‘[Who's Sorry Now?] is painful, funny and highly readable . Jacobson is at the top of his verbal form.'

‘Supple, funny and unsparing prose'

‘In Who's Sorry Now? Jacobson has refined his peculiar gifts to their purest expression yet.'

Marvin Kreitman, the luggage baron of South London, lives for sex. Or at least he lives for women. At present he loves four women - his mother, his wife Hazel, and his two daughters - and is in love with five more, his wife's interior decorator and his ex-window-dresser's mother among them. Charlie Merriweather, on the other hand, nice Charlie, loves just the one woman, also called Charlie, the wife with whom he has been writing children's books and having nice sex for twenty years. Once a week the two friends meet for a Chinese lunch in Soho, contriving never quite to have the conversation they would like to have. The conversation about fidelity and womanising, and which makes you happier. Until today, that is. And now they have started that conversation there is no stopping it. It is Charlie who takes the dangerous step of asking for a piece of Marvin's disordered life, but what follows embroils them all, the wives no less than the husbands. And none of them - nice or not-nice - will ever be the same again. No one writes better than Howard Jacobson about the sexual battlefield, its comedies and its tragedies, and in Who's Sorry Now? he is in majestic form - unnervingly truthful, poignant, and very, very funny.

Stunning new novel by the author of The Mighty Walzer.

Howard Jacobson is the author of six novels and four works of non-fiction. His last novel, The Mighty Walzer, won the Everyman Wodehouse Award for comic writing.

ONE

You can learn a lot about a man from the sorts of bedtime stories he tells his children. Marvin Kreitman, archivist of himself, put his daughters to sleep - when he was at home - with reminiscences so painful to him, they might have been designed to hurry the girls out of childhood altogether.
This was one of them:
Every Thursday, Friday, Saturday night, come wind, come rain, small squishy-hearted Marvin Kreitman - that's me - watched his father, the Purse King - that's your grandfather - shake from his leather apron, like rats from a rat-catcher's sack, the takings from his market stall. Spellbound, he watched the crumpled notes creak like sand crabs in a huddle, slowly open, move sideways and come apart. Every Thursday, Friday, Saturday night the same. And every Thursday, Friday, Saturday night, small squishy-hearted Marvin Kreitman was excluded from the count.
'Go up to your room and do your homework.' Your grandmother talking.
'I've done my homework.'

'Marvin, you can never do too much homework!'
'Can't I just stay to straighten the fivers?'
'Fivers! Fivers!' Theatrically, like a woman concealing a terrible secret, a crime or a deformity, Mona Kreitman interposed herself between her only child and the contents of the sack. 'Do you know what my dream for you is?' she asked. I did, but I waited for her to tell me anyway. 'My dream for you is that you won't ever have to touch money. My dream for you is that you will be above money. Look what money does to you.' She showed me how dirty money was, how it got into the grains of your skin, how it stained the palms of your hands and blackened the tips of your fingers the way newspapers did, only worse. Had she been able to tear open her chest for me, and show how money discoloured the soul as well, of course she would have done so.
'So why do you touch it then?'
'Ha!' A bitter laughless laugh, full of narrative promise. Once upon a time . . . But a grown-up story with no good fairies in it. Unless the good fairy was her. She lowered herself into the notes, a mermaid in a sea of creaking crabs, until we were the same size. 'We do what we do, Marvin,' she sang to me, on her knees, making 'we' a tragical and lonely word, 'because we have no choice. You, on the other hand, have a choice. We have given you that choice. You ask me why we touch money? So that you won't ever have to. Now do your homework and become Prime Minister.'
Not to be argumentative, but because I wanted to stay swimming in the warm pools of her eyes, I said, 'Prime ministers get to touch money.'
'Oh, do they now! So what do you think the Chancellor of the Exchequer is for?'
'Then I'll be Chancellor of the Exchequer.'
'See! There only has to be money on the floor and already you're thinking small. Listen to me . . . A little boy as clever as you are doesn't ever have to settle for second-best. You just do your homework and become Prime Minister.' Whereupon she put her arms around me and kissed me, more as if I were a little king than a politician, the king Cophetua and she, with her blazing black Caspian eyes, her gold hooped earrings and her filthy fingertips, the beggar-maid.
'If you want to count something,' my father chipped in, a croak from the house of the dead, 'count your blessings.'
But blessings are less easy to count than money and Marvin Kreitman never did learn to count his.
'Not even us, Daddy?' the girls were too young, in those days, to have asked.
Which might have given him pause for thought. As it was, determined to be a better parent than his own father, loving if a little absent, at his most comfortable with them once they'd actually gone to sleep, he rose from the tiny toadstool chair by their beds, put his cheek to each of theirs, smelled their hair, as sharp as Chardonnay, kissed the tangy gristle of their ears, and wished them sweet dreams.
'And tomorrow night, if you're good' - and if he happened to be home - 'I'll tell you what they did to Daddy next . . .'
Charlie Merriweather, on the other hand, a father who was always at home, sprawled on the bed with his children and invented stories calculated to make them splutter into each other's necks and slither about all over him like sea lions.
For example:
One day, Timmy Hyphen Smelly-Botty Farnsbarns, brother of Kitty-Litter Farnsbarns, was hiding in the school lavs reading the Financial Times - as he did every morning in summer, preferring to keep the Daily Telegraph, which, as you know, is warmer, for the winter months - when suddenly the headmaster, who also happened to be his father, the Right Reverend Doctor Arty-Farty Farnsbarns, hammered at the door with a dire warning. 'If you don't come out of there in the next seven and a half hours, Timmy Hyphen Smelly-Botty, you won't only end up being flushed away along with your dooh-dahs, you will miss the school outing to Feelgood Hall. And you know what that means, don't you?'