Howard Jacobson's latest sticks to the author's usual narrative of a childless Jewish man with forbidden sexual longing and diminished personal worth – but this time in a post-literate world, finds Apoorva Dutt
Book: Zoo Time
Author: Howard Jacobson
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Pages: 376
Price: Rs399
When a Booker Prize-winning author like Howard Jacobson creates a tedious, unfunny bore like the protagonist of his latest novel, Zoo Time, it can get confusing. Is the fact that this character is immensely annoying a mark of his authenticity, or the symptom of a badly-written book?
For novelist Guy Ableman, the main character of Zoo Time, the “word” is everything. He divides his life between actually writing, “mouth-writing” on solitary walks around London, and lusting after his mother-in-law, an intimidating beauty with blazing red hair, who happens to be a carbon copy of his wife. He is a critically and commercially successful author, but is deeply unhappy primarily because he believes he has missed the literary boat.
The signs of a decaying literate world are evident all around him. Bookstores are shutting shop.
Those that are still afloat aren’t able to accommodate his books on shelves weighed down by vampire fiction. Ableman’s publisher shot himself in the head after one last literary lunch. In a surreal sequence, Ernest Hemingway is reincarnated as a homeless lunatic who is forever hunched over a notebook — that is until he too drops dead. Everybody’s blogging, and ‘serious writers’ are going extinct.
In this scenario, Ableman’s sexual world takes over as a substitute obsession. Here, we wander into the territory of classical Jacobsonian kinks -- the desire to be cuckolded, a shoe fetish and oedipal urges. This frustrated sexuality is mixed with Ableman’s literary dissatisfaction, and thrown into a vat full of discourse. The rest of the novel is entirely discourse. The plot is minimal and circular. Are you having fun yet?
Jacobson knows that the reader isn’t, and that’s why Ableman rips apart the disinterested reader.
Yes, the book has no plot, but “only a moron would be interested in plot,” he scoffs. If the perversions — and the endless musings on these perversions — is off-putting, then Ableman reminds you that Henry Miller, DH Lawrence and Celine were some of the great blasphemers who wrote the most important novels of the 20th century. And if the fact that this is a novelist writing about a novelist who is worried that the hero of his novel, a novelist, is in deep shit, strikes you as indulgent, Jacobson beats you to the punch with his defensive jokes.
Jacobson’s voice overpowers any sense of his novel as an independent entity. The comedy, which doesn’t play off his own voice, seems forced (other than a hilarious take on a professional blurbist: “I laughed till I cried, and then I cried till I laughed”) He also anticipates feminist criticism — the female characters are vague and without agency — by having these very characters accuse Ableman of misogyny, and of creating unidentifiable female characters. At the end of it, Zoo Time is an extraordinarily well-fortified novel. Too bad that it’s also an empty one.
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