Thinking hard about his own terrors

Novels by Howard Jacobson seldom agree with themselves, let alone with the critics. So it should hardly come as a surprise to find their author - the morning after his Man Booker Prize victory, a late-night party and two hours' sleep - wants to take issue with the headline tags for his book.

Do you assume The Finkler Question has at last secured one of the most coveted literary honours for both a leading comic, and a leading Jewish novelist? Think again: as Jacobson always asks us do to.

"I sometimes get irritated when I see my books described as specific hunts for Jewish identity," he says. "I don't feel that's what my writing is doing. I'm doing our identity."

As for the "comedy" pigeonhole, he says: "The comic novel is not a genre. It's the novel. The comic novel is doing what novels are paid to do."

The Finkler Question throbs, and sobs, with life in a story of grief, belief and memory shared between three protagonists - two Jewish, one an envious wannabe. However adept at comedy, however immersed in Jewishness, the novel defies all label-stickers. Yet, "I walk into these things," its author admits. "I create the rods for my own back. I write about Jews, and then complain about being talked of as 'a Jewish novelist'.

"I want people to find my books funny, because being the entertainer is hugely important to me. But when they call me a comic novelist, I don't like it."

Jacobson never thought he would see his day of Booker triumph dawn. He was "totally flabbergasted" by the win. For he feels the innate subversion of comedy will always divide judges. "If comedy is indeed as rattling as I think it is, then you're going to be very lucky to find three out of five people who won't argue furiously about it. Whereas a beautifully written elegy set in Connemara is likely to disturb that panel a lot less." From his 1983 debut Coming from Behind to recent fictions such as Kalooki Nights and The Act of Love, Jacobson's comedy has always been as serious as life itself. The Mancunian novelist, presenter and columnist has never repeated the same old trick, or shtick. The Finkler Question's success comes after a series of books that saw him take ambitious gambles with form, tone - and even taste. Kalooki Nights had concentration-camp scenes; The Act of Love turned on the fetish of a jealous husband's voyeurism. Jacobson has grown older, and bolder: "Breaking up narrative; writing scenes where you're not quite sure what's happening to whom. And some of the eroticisms explored are rather painful."

His audacity in The Finkler Question often pivots on the trials, and insights, of old age - especially as the widowed refugee Libor mourns his wife. Libor's creator, born in 1942, now relishes the view in winter. "However wonderful it is to see a young writer full of energy and juice, there is something about being an older writer that opens up a whole new world to you," says Jacobson.

For him, the Libor sections are about "the sadness of the fact that an old man is a complete man. An old man is not depleted. There's a tragedy about that, because it would almost be kinder if he were depleted. Because he would be less wounded by himself, or woundable."

As he wrote of Libor's ordeal, Jacobson looked into his own abyss. "This was writing that came out of doing something I have not done before, which was pushing myself forward into a dreaded hour. I wanted to think hard about my own terrors."

Another aspect of Jacobson's boldness turns on his depiction of the "ASHamed Jews": grandstanding anti-Zionists who make a media show of their disgust at Israel today. "I was highly conscious it could topple into mere satire," he says. "In the end, I thought, would it do any harm to let some satire let rip a bit?"

Jacobson objects not to the protesters' political commitments, but to the carnival they make of their conscience. "Criticise Israel all you like. It depends, as everything depends, on the temperature of your rhetoric and so on. But the 'ASHamed Jews' for me are a parody of people sanctimonious about their beliefs."

Against the public fuss of Zionists and anti-Zionists, the novel sets the private mourning of media philosopher Sam Finkler, Czech journalist Libor Sevcik - and their friend Julian Treslove, the very non-Jewish nebbish [an ineffectual or timid] person whose funny-sad hankerings for the grandeur of a Jewish destiny lends the book bittersweet laughter.

Julian's elective Jewishness lets Jacobson shed light on the real thing - if it exists. "What it is, beyond what you eat or who you pray for, is one of the great mysteries. If a Jew doesn't want to think about Jewishness, he either leaves or - better still - he practises. But if you think about it at all, then back you go into something so ancient it's almost unbearable."

The Finkler Question faces down not so much the absurdities of identity politics as what Jacobson calls "existential nausea". Doing so, it wears an infinitely stoic smile: "You've got to survive this. And comedy is the great survival strategy."

- Independent