I feel a rant coming on and it's been coming for a while. So it isn't pertinent only to this novel.

Must every literary writer use the "f" word as not only their verb of choice but also their modifier of every verb, adjective and other adverb? I've seen this more and more often in the last few years. A handful of times, I understand; sometimes an obscenity works in a story better than a non-offensive term. I'm not normally squeamish about language, honestly. But there comes a point when the shock value is gone and the offensive word garners only a yawn and a question as to whether people really talk this way or if the writer couldn't think of a different word to use. I wonder if this is a literary device I didn't learn about in English class at my Christian high school. For that matter, I didn't learn about it in any of my undergraduate or graduate literature classes, unless it was the one Modern Drama class period that I skipped my senior year.

Okay, now that the rant is out of my system, here's my take on the book. I liked it, and not only because it would be politically incorrect to be anti-Finklerish. It's by turns funny, satiric, sad, and angry. Three men, two Jewish, one not, are friends of sorts. The Jewish men have both lost their wives recently and the Gentile longs to have someone to lose, just so he can experience the melodrama of having her die in his arms. Treslove, the Gentile, also longs to be Jewish (or a Finkler, as he terms it) like his friend Sam Finkler.

Treslove is a difficult character to cheer for—it seems more appropriate to snigger at his sappiness and obsessions—but he's not unsympathetic. He's too close to being like many of us for us to be completely comfortable with ridiculing him. I didn't like his affair with Tyler (Finkler's late wife), but it does highlight Treslove's obsession with identifying completely with the Jewish people. Supposedly Finkler had it "coming to him", but I thought Treslove was (bleeping) Tyler only because she was Jewish. Ironically, Tyler isn't Jewish by birth but converted to Judaism when she married Finkler; doubly ironic is that Finkler doesn't want to be Jewish himself and wouldn't have married her if she really had been Jewish.

The book addresses the question of Jewish identity in an amazingly and dizzingly insightful way. If it hadn't been for the constant use of the "f" word, I would have enjoyed this more. Still, I'm going to look for more Jacobson's books. He's a great writer.