Jubb

Keith Waterhouse

3.45 · Rating details · 44 ratings · 3 reviews

Get A Copy

Paperback, 256 pages

Published July 24th 1986 by Grafton

More Details... Edit Details

Friend Reviews

To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up.

Reader Q&A

To ask other readers questions about Jubb, please sign up.

Be the first to ask a question about Jubb

Lists with This Book

This book is not yet featured on Listopia. Add this book to your favorite list »

Community Reviews

Showing 1-30

Average rating 3.45 ·

Rating details

· 44 ratings · 3 reviews

More filters

Sort order

Start your review of Jubb

Oct 04, 2009 Mark Desrosiers rated it really liked it

Shelves: fiction

This long out-of-print novel was pressed into my hand many weeks ago by a groovy, demented Nabokov obsessive who hangs about my workplace all day. This is the guy I'm always trying to strongarm into reading some Kingsley Amis or A.L. Kennedy -- decent comic novelists -- but he will only read funny books which Nabokov approved. Which means Jubb by Keith Waterhouse, apparently mentioned in an obscure Vlad interview. I checked the book out the library, and let it gather some dust for a few weeks be This long out-of-print novel was pressed into my hand many weeks ago by a groovy, demented Nabokov obsessive who hangs about my workplace all day. This is the guy I'm always trying to strongarm into reading some Kingsley Amis or A.L. Kennedy -- decent comic novelists -- but he will only read funny books which Nabokov approved. Which means Jubb by Keith Waterhouse, apparently mentioned in an obscure Vlad interview. I checked the book out the library, and let it gather some dust for a few weeks before grabbing it to take on the bus about a month ago. The opening pages were quite funny -- an obsessive skirt-chaser staring at gurls while solemnly recounting his own serene marriage. Then something odd happened: I got to work I read on the internets that Keith Waterhouse died that very same night. As if his glowering heavenly countenance commanded me to start reading his obscure Billy Liar followup. As far as I could tell, I was the only person on the entire planet reading Jubb on that day, not a very positive trait, as Jubb is one of the most dire, unlikeable literary creations in recent memory.

Cyril Jubb, age 36, is a sober rent collector, amateur photographer, luster after women. His wife is on some sort of vacation, though Jubb helpfully reveals her actual whereabouts later on. He is obsessed with Ruth, a childhood friend who seems to have been collaborator in his only spontaneous sexual experience ever, when they were both teens. He is also intent on forming a youth Photography club: you can probably guess where that's going. And he wanders far and wide at night, staring into windows where women might be undressing.

And yes, just as his window-peeping and Kodak Brownie fiddling seem to be heading somewhere, things start to collapse. A clumsy sex-coercion attempt instigated by his perceived authority as a rent collector casts him into the abyss (so we think). He circles the drain in the novel's last half -- attempts to join the local Fascist party branch (but they won't have him), then gets beat up by a bunch of schoolboys who pants him and spit on his bare crotch. Though Jubb has obviously engineered his own Kaskaesque circumstance, with dried spittle on his cock and his trusses in disarray, he never hits bottom. Just keeps plodding on, drinking milk and trying to make obscene phone calls. In the last pages, Jubb moves it forward (or rather, eastward), an existential triumph for one of the saddest bastards ever. A genuinely funny novel where you cheer the demolition of the creepy narrator, but it never actually happens. ...more

flag 5 likes · Like · see review

Feb 11, 2015 Neale rated it really liked it

Sexual intercourse began, according to Philip Larkin, in 1963 - between the lifting of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles' first LP. It was also the year, appropriately enough, when 'Jubb', Keith Waterhouse's follow-up to 'Billy Liar', was published.

Jubb is a highly Larkinesque character, with his obsessive interest in naked women, his physical self-loathing, his belief (well-justified) that the world of sex has passed him by. The book is remarkably frank for its era: it takes place at that mom ...more

flag 1 like · Like · see review

Aug 19, 2019 Garry Nixon rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Despite what it says on the cover of the early edition paperback, this ain't no Lolita, though a comparative study might be interesting. It was a first to read a novel in which one naturally sympathised with the narrator until a moment came when one thought, "ugh". ...more

flag Like · see review