Four pages of Kreitman’s father blow the younger characters away and you long for more. Contemporary culture is shrill and meretricious; young people likewise The older characters are the most interesting. Like many of Jacobson’s heroes he is a suffering joker, trying to laugh away the burdens of his parents, his marriage, his longings for high culture.Is this what reduces him to “a beast in pain”, what makes him heartsore? Or is it the sense of what might have been that haunts him? The characters in Who’s Sorry Now? can’t let go of their past It was when they were most alive Partly, this is Jacobson’s point. And much of the comedy in the novel is about his “love troubles” with women.But although much of the action is about affairs that go wrong, that’s not the real baggage Kreitman carries. “A sperm-tank heterosexual”, he loves four women and is in love with five more. But what kind of baggage does he carry? There is sexual baggage and plenty of it.
Highly sexed but “squishy-hearted”, successful yet a failure, Kreitman is “the luggage baron of South London”. There has been a struggle.This is what makes the hero of Who’s Sorry Now?, Marvin Kreitman, such a fascinating character. This is what makes his recent writing so enjoyable, its sense of assurance – but also its sense that finding a voice and a place does not come easily. Even the titles – No More Mister Nice Guy, Who’s Sorry Now? – suggest a letting go, a breaking out (from what, though?). And it’s there in thinkers like Isaiah Berlin and Lionel Trilling.What has emerged in Jacobson’s series for Channel 4 and in his recent novels is the sense of having found a voice that works for him.
It is a problem you find in many postwar Jewish writers, here and in America: in early Bellow, in Muriel Spark and Frederic Raphael. But there was a problem, and it has something to do with how Jewish can a voice be in a gentile culture.How can he find a voice that will include both his father’s market stall in Manchester and the great, gentile tradition he studied with Leavis at Cambridge? The discomfort or unease of Jacobson’s early heroes in a gentile culture is in some kind of relationship with the author’s unease about finding a voice.I don’t wish to overpersonalise this. Jacobson writes (and speaks) with such assurance and fluency and range, that it is hard to imagine a time when it was hard for him to find a voice as a writer. That seems a world away from the highly sexed, scabrously funny prose of the recent books. It is always there.In a recent lecture, Jacobson spoke of his Jamesian early writings. There is nothing throwaway about the matter of Jacobson’s Jewishness. It is certainly there in Who’s Sorry Now? At one point the very gentile mother of the very gentile Charlotte Merriweather writes in her diary about a brief sexual encounter with Leonard Woolf, Virginia’s husband, and refers to “the matter of his Jewishness” It’s an odd moment; almost a throwaway line But it isn’t.
