There is no escaping what this novel is about. The main character, Maxie, is in middle life and its angst, with the extra “stress of coming from an ethno-religious minority, or whatever you call us, whose genius doesn’t extend to irresponsible recreation. Jews don’t do Paradise Regained. Once you’re out you’re out with my people.”
Maxie grows up “in Crumpsall Park in the 1950s, somewhere between the ghettos and the greenery of North Manchester.” He’s a cartoonist whose works include Five Thousand Years of Bitterness, “a comic-book history of the sufferings of the Jewish people over the last five millennia”.
Howard Jacobson has complained that English Jewish writers don’t write about Jewishness (eg Harold Pinter). To make up for this, in Kalooki Nights he distils to 120 proof the Jewish aspect of Philip Roth. Maxie is the son of a Marxist atheist boxer and his lovely kalooki [a card game] playing wife. He marries women called Chloe or Zoe and his marriages to these women resemble Philip Roth’s marriages to damaged shikseh ball breakers, i.e. not successful. Zoe, the disappointed artist, is especially like Roth’s terrible Maureen in My Life as a Man. However whereas Roth’s protagonists, his alter egos, are in a rage of thwarted entitlement and are magnificent priapic monsters, Maxie is English, sad and resigned.
Making Maxie a cartoonist gets around the accusation that this novel is cartoonish. Every character is defined by their Jewishness – their possession of it or attitudes towards it eg Zoe, Maxie’s wife, after marrying Maxie because he is Jewish, now has her misgivings:-
“What do you want me to do, have a fucking nose job?”
She thought about it. Showed me her impertinently undemonstrative Gentile profile, every feature segregated from the other. My features, whatever else you thought about them, were on good terms, enjoyed a warm confabulation, each with each. Zoe’s face was a species of apartheid.
“Good idea,” she said at last. “Have it off.”
“You used to like my nose.”
“I used to like you.”
“Then why do you want me to stop at the nose? Why don’t I have everything off?”
She pushed her mouth at me approvingly, one lip at a time, making little stars of fucking Bethlehem . . .dance in her frosty fucking eyes. . . Never a minute when a theological squabble two thousand years old was not present between us.
Maxie’s wife tells him Holocaust jokes and his English lady mother-in-law “bought me a toy rabbi to hang in the rear window of my Volokswagen.” (There are umlauts on the vowels, but my computer won’t do them.) The English upper middle class are not flagrantly outspoken in their prejudices, so here is the cartoonist/caricaturist at work.
Kalooki Nights is a travel guide round Jewishness and anti-semitism. Conversations are always on those themes, and become mini essays or blog pieces. Mick, a philo-semite Irishman who marries Maxie’s sister is sitting in a restaurant eating k’nish, and
tried to get me on the difference between shmendrik and shmerrel and shmuch and shmegege and shmulky and shlemiel and shlimazel and shovontx and the hundreds of others – the rich roll-call of dishonour in which a people who prize intelligence above all things register the minutes distinctions between ignorance, simplicity, folly, buffoonery, ineptitude, sadness and sheer bad luck.
His characters go to Israel:-
It seemed to trouble Manny that he could not decide what colour Jerusalem was. Was it yellow, gold, bronze, or just luminous – no colour in nature at all, because it was set apart from nature, exquisite in its separation, like the incontrovertible expression of God’s will? If you tried to imagine the colour of Elohim’s countenance when it shone upon you – what the Jews called the Shechina, the divine refulgence – this was the colour. He also could not decide whether Jerusalem was beautiful or a rubbish tip. Everywhere you looked, stones. Great hewn boulders that might once have been the walls of the Temple, but might just as easily have been the stones rejected at the time of the Temple’s construction. Discarded and left to lie where they fell for the next two thousand years. But each fragment with something to tell you. The whole city was like a whispering gallery, every atom of every stone clamouring for your attention. It made some people ill, Asher told him. It made them run from the city with their hands over their ears.
That is a fine piece of writing, but it’s not Manny’s thoughts. It’s a sensitive traveller’s.
Where the book was most like a good novel were the scenes in the family home, when Maxie’s father’s comrades come round and suddenly the house is breathing with purposeful men, or when the ladies dress up and foregather to play kalooki and the house turns female. The pages stopped flashing their garish panels of kapow! between the characters and warmly and sweetly did what a novel can do – created a world with an atmosphere partly familiar – yes, I remember something like that in my own world – partly exotic.
As a contrast to this were pages of a creepy pornographic fantasy involving Ilse Koch at Buchenwald sexually tormenting an artist, a self-projection of Maxie, which I found painful and sickening to read.
(I asked someone why the BNP, however much they try, can never hide their Nazism. It always leaks out. “The Holocaust is pornography for some people” was the answer and I think it’s true. Howard Jacobson has faced it down – exposed it if you like – and it’s brave writing, but it’s stomach turning.)
Having now read two of Howard Jacobson’s novels I’d say that he can’t do character, he has a pictorial eye and that he likes to mythologise his people and their encounters into dramatic allegories. I admire his writing generally and would read any amount of non-fiction by him but I don’t want to read another of his novels.
At the end of Kalooki Nights, which burned with righteous anger and victimhood, I felt as if I’d been visiting someone bereaved and highly eloquent on their bereavement, someone whose child had been killed, say, and who told me, over and over, everything about the child and the manner of its death. Goodwill, proper compassion, politeness would be abraded away. I’d be looking for excuses to go somewhere else and hear about something else.
You can’t hide in fiction. You can hedge in an article, put in your perhapses, your reservations, your even-handedness. In fiction you lay yourself bare. Howard Jacobson is nakedly obsessive in this book. He makes a joke of it and says over and over again that he is obsessed before we do. He is furiously obsessed. Anger, that makes the inarticulate kick and swear, fuels him into creation. He’s like the drummer with Tourette’s who still keeping time, pounds vehemently as he rolls round the kit.
You think it horrible that lust and rage
should dance attention upon my old age;
They were not such a plague when I was young;
what else have I to spur me into song?
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