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Who's Sorry Now
 
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Who's Sorry Now (Hardcover)

by Howard Jacobson (Author)
3.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)

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Product details

  • Hardcover: 320 pages
  • Publisher: Jonathan Cape Ltd (25 April 2002)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0224062867
  • ISBN-13: 978-0224062862
  • Product Dimensions: 21.6 x 14.4 x 3.2 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 62,769 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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    #4 in  Books > Fiction > Authors, A-Z > J > Jacobson, Howard

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Product Description

Amazon.co.uk Review
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

Review
"Jacobson's humour is unashamedly savage and his jokes as sharp as a switch-blade...comic vitriol worthy of Evelyn Waugh." -- "Sunday Express"
"There are few novelists today who can imbue the trifles of life with such poetry." -- "Independent"

"From the Trade Paperback edition."

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Customer Reviews

3 Reviews
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Average Customer Review
3.3 out of 5 stars (3 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

 
16 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars The Very Model of a Masterpiece, 8 Sep 2002
By John Self "www.theasylum.wordpress.com" (Belfast, NI) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)   
It's immediately easy to see why this was longlisted for the Booker and Jacobson's earlier comedy of sexual manners, No More Mister Nice Guy, wasn't - it's longer, denser, more intricate and frankly less out-and-out entertaining. The theme - an eternal for Jacobson - is similar: "men and women, women and men - it'll never work. Or will it?" The novel has two protagonists (because, even though they both have wives who play equally important parts in the book, with Jacobson it's the men who tell the tale, as always), Marvin Kreitman - "the luggage baron of South London" - and Charlie Merriweather - half of the husband-and-wife gestalt-entity children's author C.C. Merriweather (his wife is also called Charlie).

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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3 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars I'm sorry for reading this book, 27 May 2003
By Mr T C Lockett (Whitley, East Yorkshire United Kingdom) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Who's Sorry Now (Paperback)
Really disapointed, well, to be fair, I can't say I was ever excited in the first place. I nearly stopped reading the book about a quarter of the way through, it just bored me.

Lots of airy fairy prose, it seems not to have the more linear narrative I expected.

But, each to their own, you may love it!

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0 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars TOO THOUGHTFUL BY FAR, 4 Feb 2007
By Scribbler (Ashford, Kent, UK) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Who's Sorry Now (Paperback)
I agree with reviewer John Self that this is not typical Jacobson and that was my main disappointment. It is full of long passages on the state of the relationship between men and women and, frankly, all the characters are pretty repulsive. Not particularly funny and that's what you expect from Jacobson, so I've had to mark it down. Not the book to start with if you want to see what a great coemdy writer he is. 'No More Mr Nice Guy' should be your first stop. Sorry, Howard, but if we want thoughtful Jewish there are plenty of writers who have already filled that market.
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