Howard Jacobson
The late Andy Kaufman's genius lay in this: He took a comedian's worst fear - utter failure to make anyone laugh - and turned it into a virtue, emerging as one of the hottest entertainers of his all-too-brief time.
When you didn't find him funny, he still won. By mastering his own dread, he created a world in which dread couldn't possibly exist.
Felix Quinn, hero of Howard Jacobson's wonderful new novel, is an Andy Kaufman of the heart. Jilted in early adolescence by a movie date, he feels compelled as an adult to re-enact the searing pain in order to vanquish it. He seeks out women who will cheat on him, then tells himself that this is what he actually likes.
"No man has ever adored a woman who does not know her to be lying in the arms of someone else," he says.
Even a veteran non-man such as I knows this to be untrue, but it does raise an interesting question: Do we only ever want people because others want them too? It's only one of the many scary aperçus that dot this fascinating sneak into love's darkest alleys.
Felix is a lonely antiquarian bookseller who will typically spend an evening "sitting in my study drinking blood-red wine and listening to lieder." Snooty and priggish, he is nonetheless passionate. The object of his desire is Marisa, the beautiful wife he once lured from someone else (proof, naturally, of her luscious inconstancy). In the months leading to their meeting, "my skin was thinning in preparation for someone," trembles Felix. Marisa is cool, smart, stiletto-heeled. She is so lovely that Felix feels compelled to share her. Enter Marius, the rake he selects to fall in love with her.
What's important to note here is that this is not a book about sex - or not merely about sex, at any rate. Felix knows he shares much with tawdry swingers; spying on one's own wife in the arms of another is ultimately a fairly commonplace fantasy.
Further, Jacobson's beautiful, rhythmic writing promises a kind of dank eroticism: "You know it when you walk into the torture garden of your own disordered nature. You recognize the gorgeous foliage, overgrown and fantastical. You know the smell. The smell of home."
But sex is of no help to Felix, as an explanation. He visits a fetish club thinking he may find masochistic confreres, but the atmosphere is depressing and silly. No, in the end what he seeks is an abasement of the marrow, not the flesh, and while sexual deviants share a sense of clubby belonging, romantic deviants shiver alone in the wind. "No one could have been further removed than I was from the breezy Disneyland of wife-swapping, cocktail nuts and ankle chains," he says sadly.
In art, however, Felix hears echoes of himself. He cites numerous references to paintings, plays and books about female adultery, though he also twists many of them to his own ends: We know that Othello doesn't actually want Desdemona to cheat on him. Or do we? Jacobson is clever enough to have you rethink not only this play but the whole notion of sexual ownership, at least while you're reading his novel. And as he points out, the best art, like romantic love, does not deal in what should be, but in what so pathetically and wrongly is.
As a character, Felix is, like Nabokov's Humbert Humbert, a gilt-framed European snob whose saving grace is his aching romantic vulnerability. And yet he loves with a breadth Humbert can only hope for. The comely Marisa is an equal, an adult - but most important, a person adored for exactly who she is. At one point, Felix says that in adultery she is "labouring for him." But he wouldn't have married her, were this not her natural way.
Jacobson, author of 2006's corrosively insightful Kalooki Nights, is primarily known as a comic writer, and although this new book is a generally horrifying tromp around the human heart, it is still enormously funny. His descriptions of the characters are frequently hilarious: super-cad Marius, bizarrely afflicted with "walrus moustaches," belongs to those who "attend a funeral jealously, wishing to appropriate it for themselves."
The book is also a gem of technical sophistication. First-person narrative slowly becomes omniscient as Felix speculates on what his wife might be doing, thereby exposing what an omniscient narrator really is: an underhanded spy who pretends to be doing you a favour.
The best thing about this novel - and there are so many good things - is that it doesn't discount the wan little definition of love offered up at so many Christian weddings via Paul's letter to the Corinthians. To Jacobson, love is still patient, still kind, still bears all things. It's just so much else besides: complicated, funny, cruel, sick and always worth one's while. Much like this wickedly terrific book.
Cynthia Macdonald is as Toronto writer who has been to Disneyland twice, but did not see any wife-swapping.