The Finkler Question

by Howard Jacobson

He was a man who ordinarily woke to a sense of loss. He could not remember a single morning of his life when he had woken to a sense of possession. When there was nothing palpable he could reproach himself for having lost, he found the futility he needed in world affairs or sport. A plane had crashed – it didn’t matter where. An eminent and worthy person had been disgraced – it didn’t matter how. The English cricket team had been trounced – it didn’t matter by whom. Since he didn’t follow or give a fig for sport, it was nothing short of extraordinary that his abiding sense of underachievement should have found a way to associate itself with the national cricket team’s. He did the same with tennis, with footballers, with boxers, with snooker players even. When a fly and twitchy south Londoner called Jimmy White went into the final session of the World Snooker Championship seven frames ahead with eight to play and still managed to end the night a loser, Treslove retired to his bed a beaten man and woke broken-hearted. Did he care about snooker? No. Did he admire Jimmy White and want him to win? No. Yet in White’s humiliating capitulation to the gods of failure Treslove was somehow able to locate his own. Not impossibly, White himself passed the day following his immeasurable loss laughing and joking with friends, buying everyone he knew drinks, in far better spirits than Treslove did.

He had begun to wake to the old sense of absurd loss again. Searching for the acute disappointment he felt and locating it in a sporting catastrophe: a tennis player he didn’t care about losing to another tennis player he had never heard of; the English cricket team being defeated by an innings and several hundred runs on the Indian subcontinent; a football match, any football match, ending in a gross injustice; even a golfer losing his nerve on the final hole – golf a game he neither played nor followed.