The Finkler Question: A Review

The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson is perhaps the funniest book I've ever read; it's also seriously brilliant. This is a novel that deserved to win the Booker prize.

It's about anti-semitism in particular, but more generally about other-ness and self, about hatred, jealousy and love. The first 2/3 is laugh out loud funny, so much so that I attracted attention from my kids (what's so funny, Mom?), my h (who took the kobo from me to read a passage) and strangers who looked around to see the hilarity for themselves (in the girls' change room, in the lobby of a nursing home).

The last third, while funny in spots, is necessarily more serious as the book draws toward its end, and each of the main characters is inescapably confronted with humanity's worse aspects, each of them choosing a different response.

The three main characters are an elderly widower, a middle-aged widower, and a middle-aged man who has, his whole life, been a mourner in search of an object to be mourned. The first two are Jewish types. Libor is a nearly 90 year old holocaust and Communist era survivor who moved between Hollywood and London. Sam Finkler is an ASHamed Jew (the name of the organization he co-founded), a loud, successful philosopher-author of self-help books and tv personality. While they have an overabundance of identity to cope with, Julian is their foil, a Gentile with too little, a wannabe something who makes a living by imitation as a celebrity look-alike, a dreamer who wants to hold a dying woman in his arms, and if not that, to be a persecuted Jew.

The humour in the novel comes from playing with these types, taking a core of truth and exaggerating it in caricature to highlight its characteristics. And yet the characters aren't simple or flat, but rounded out and turned around so that we can see other dimensions of who they are and how they interact with each other, their children, their wives, their lovers.

I don't know if it sounds as funny as it is, or as sharp. I wasn't all that attracted to the book by the descriptions I read of it, but it was available as an e-book at my library, so I downloaded it.

Readers on amazon are about evenly divided between people who loved it and people who hated it, which I find interesting and not uncommon. I've been on both sides of that fence, liking A Reliable Wife, and disliking The Kite Runner (second half), for example.

By the end of the first page of The Finkler Question, I knew that Howard Jacobson could write, but it wasn't until the end of the first chapter that I realized just how well. He's a smart guy that Jacobson, and a compassionate one, who isn't afraid to stick his hands into some of humanity's nasty bits. And yet I didn't end the book feeling at all depressed by it. If anything I felt elated by the brilliance of the novel, its humour and its honesty.

This is what I drew from it. There are various responses one can have to the pain of this world and to life, but the best of them is to live fully, mourn honestly and love one another.

Filed under: Literary Tagged: Howard Jacboson, The Finkler Question