I AM FUNNY

James Wood takes the recent Booker Prize winner, The Finkler Question, to considerable task in the New Yorker this week.  (Subscription required.)

The novel’s prose may be calm enough, but the novel’s form will seem exaggerated, because it is monochromatically devoted to funniness, as a fever is devoted to heat. Howard Jacobon’s “The Finkler Question” is an English Comic Novel, in this sense. It is always shouting, “I am funny.” Jacobson has a weakness for breaking into one-line paragraphs, so as to nudge the punch line on us. The effect is bullying, and, worse, bathetic: we have probably already predicted the joke by the time we reach its italicization. There is a delicious quality of overstatement in P. G. Wodehouse that Jacobson may be searching for, but Wodehouse’s exaggerations are sublime in part because they constitute a magical and separate universe that has its own laws and “codes.” Julian Treslove, the novel’s sad-sack hero, a forty-nine-year-old nebbish Gentile, suffers from a “sense of loss,” which is that all he has really wanted, all along, is to be a Jew. There is a secondhand quality to Jacobson’s portraiture: the outlines are garish rather than vivid. And Treslove’s admiring stupidity constantly pushes the representation of Jews and Jewishness toward caricature. This vision, in which Jews are God-like, and non-Jews must inevitably become either God-lovers or God-haters, has the functional utility of interpreting anti-Semitism as a twisted form of love, while by the same token suggesting that philo-Semitism is a twisted form of hate. The novel is ultimately politically fatalistic in similar ways. Needless to say, this is a decisively male and modern version of Jewishness, much influenced by the historic pugilism of Philip Roth’s weaker novels. It also appears to be Jacobson’s preferred version of both Jewishness and Jewish comic fiction. Forced down the funnel of a reductive brand of English comic writing, this vision issues in caricature.

Now you all know I revere Wood; and I have not yet read The Finkler Question, though I plan to.  (It's here on my desk as I type this.)  And Wood frames the problems in the context of a certain kind of English comic novel.  But his objections reminded me very much of his response to Nicole Krauss's The History of Love, a response I disagreed with here, and it does leave me wondering if he has a blind spot regarding certain types of (admittedly broad) Jewish humor.  From the new review:

I found that I was regularly writing in the margin of The Finkler Question, after a statement such as, "Whereupon he stormed out of the house," the quiet objection, "No, he didn't."

From the Krauss:

Repeatedly, the reader comes to the end of passages in this book and intones to himself (in Alma-ish block capitals): I DON’T BELIEVE YOU.

His review approvingly cites Bellow and Svevo, but Finkler and History are books that sing in a different key and it sometimes seems Wood won't acknowledge that distinction.  As I said, I haven't read Finkler, so mostly I'm just thinking out aloud as the weekend settles upon us ... 

Comments

[Pete]

That excerpt leads me to believe that Wood is too goddamned serious to evaluate comic fiction.

[Michael A. Rizzo]

I read Wood's review when i was about 100 pages into Finkler, and I don't think I've ever disagreed more strongly with him. Much as I love his deployment of the word 'Mozartean' in reference to the qualities of Bellow's prose, I really feel that most of Woods' curtailment of Jacobson's achievement really is of his own devising (esp. vis-a-vis his own definition of comedy vs. The Comic Novel, which is one of his perennial call-backs to his own previous works, in this case esp. those essays collected in The Irresponsible Self). Also, I think his comparison of two beloved writers of mine, Wodehouse and M. Amis, similarly curtails both of their achievements, esp. the latter's. I haven't disagreed with Wood so strongly since his review of Lowboy. Anyway, back to Finkler....

[Michael A. Rizzo]

I think I just contradicted myself, so let me make myself clear: I disagreed with Wood most strongly on Finkler. One proviso: I will always find myself in accord with Wood when it comes to the great Sabbath's Theater, no matter what....

[Michael A. Rizzo]

And one more thing: The Pregnant Widow is a masterpiece, the summation of Martin Amis' life-work (bypassing all of his Islamophobic journalism). I think it's his best work since his seminal review of Lolita. (Sorry, thought I'd liven things up a bit.)

[Carolyn]

I think the essence of his review - "Treslove’s admiring stupidity constantly pushes the representation of Jews and Jewishness toward caricature.... this is a decisively male and modern version of Jewishness, much influenced by the historic pugilism of Philip Roth’s weaker novels." - is pretty dead-on. I read and reviewed the book, too.

[Busta]

This is vintage Woods - traversing the line between insight and pedantry like a soldier running serpentine through machinegun fire.

[Bill]

I like Jacobson (though I haven't read Kalooki Nights) but do think he tends often to give his characters or novels a theme or guiding principle in the manner of a comic humour, that often identifies that character too monomaniacally and reductionistically. I can see that as a problem that Wood would not think it worth overcoming. For me the central character in "Finkler" 's goyish obsession with Judiaism was unbelievable but worth accepting as a central starting conceit.

I do think in "Finkler" the different characters, each with a different stance on their Jewishness or lack thereof, might individually tend to caricature but eventually work together to paint a varied and ultimately moving portrait of a modern dilemma.

[TK]

What hasn't been said, and needs to be said:

Wood's review is not just a poorly argued review, and poorly written review. It's an anti-semitic review. Right down to the big-nosed illustration that accompanies it.

Full-bore anti-semitism? No. Subtle anti-semitism, the more insidious kind. And, frankly, a particularly English brand of it.

The entire review can be summed up this way: Jacobson, you're too Jewish.

Wood caricatures Jacobson in order to put him down. "Garish," "hyperbolic," "impatient," "shouting," "fatalistic." In other words: Jewish.

The review is very, very uneasy with what is not decorous and considered -- what is not formal and elegant. He has real problems with Jacobson's tendency to exaggerate -- but what is comedy, if not exaggeration?

I was surprised to see Wood speak of Bellow as
"Mozartean" -- completely ignoring that what makes Bellow Bellow is his elegant pugilism, his brio, his zesty exuberance. His Jewishness. All his best writing has these qualities.

The review is also full of laughers. Wood writes of filling the margins of his copy with criticisms. Well, I wrote in the margins of his review several times. To wit: "Comedy is the angle at which most of us see the world?" Huh? Who's us? Ruling class elites? And how about this one: "monochromatically devoted to funniness, as a fever is devoted to heat." Huh? And this one: Jacobson "can't take his foot off the exaggeration pedal." Wow; really bad.

Wood is not always so bad, but he's vastly overrated as a writer of prose; he tries to hard; his analogies and metaphors are too often straining. Seldom does a review simply FLOW. It's criticism of the most constipated kind.

I was also bothered, here, that he uses an author's own words in an interview -- not considered words, but spoken words -- against him. Bad, bad form.

Also bad: the review never mentions that Jacobson's novel won the Booker Prize, the preeminent British literary award.

The job of a critic is to try to understand an author's intention, and to then judge from there. Wood didn't do this. He tries to fit Jacobson under his own notion of what comedy is and isn't, and judges accordingly.

I feel awful for Jacobson, to have a countryman trash him in America's most prestigious literary magazine. And for what? To what end?

[Sam]

Hi everyone

I wanted to ask if anyone knew if there existed anywhere the transcript of Wood's critique which was available to view without subscription? I'm not feeling particularly flush with money in these days before Christmas!

Happy holidays in any case,

Sam