When the writer Alan Coren was asked by his friend Jeffrey Archer to provide a quote for his new book, which Coren didn’t much like, he came up with the following: “Fans of Jeffrey Archer will not be disappointed.” It’s a joke, but it’s funny because it’s true. There are writers whose readers, once initiated, will follow them anywhere, their distinctive vision and style acting as a wall that keeps fans in the fold just as surely as it repels those with no appetite for it.
Howard Jacobson is one of those writers. For four decades his novels have covered territories of subject matter, from a washed-up academic (Coming from Behind, 1983) to a coming-of-age story with added ping-pong (The Mighty Walzer, 1999) to Jewishness and death (his 2010 Booker winner, The Finkler Question). But what unites them is the propulsive energy of his prose, which is entirely devoid of secondhand sentences. He is a man made of words.
The style drives the books on even when the plot meanders (and the plot almost always meanders): the first 50 pages of The Making of Henry (2004) were so fluent and funny that it was another 100 before I realised it wasn’t really going anywhere. It was too late: I was in Jacobson’s world and there wasn’t – still isn’t – any escape from that.
Below the surface subject matter, certain themes dominate: desire and sexual love, with their humiliations, reversals and conflicts, usually delivered by a middle-aged male character who’s equal parts comic, despairing and randy. It’s there in No More Mr Nice Guy (1998, and the only novel ever to make me cry with laughter), in Who’s Sorry Now? (2002, featuring wife-swapping) and in The Act of Love (2008) with its premise – peculiar to anyone who hasn’t considered these things as much as Jacobson evidently has – that “no man has ever loved a woman and not imagined her in the arms of someone else”.
So it’s no surprise to see him return to the battlefield with his 17th novel, What Will Survive of Us (“is love”, to complete the line from Larkin that gives the book its title). It’s about an adulterous affair in which fortysomethings Lily (married to Hal) and Sam (husband to Selena) meet and – to quote the novel’s opening word – “Kerpow!” Sam is a playwright with “louche, lazy eyes and hair a journalist had described as enraged”, Lily a documentary maker: work brings them together, but what keeps them together is… well, the entire book is an explanation of that.
Sam writes plays about “famously troubled men”, but in Jacobson’s world, all men are troubled, and although the novel switches between Sam’s and Lily’s viewpoints, he always seems most at home in a man’s head. Here, men are predictable – “the nervous schoolboy never leaves the grown man altogether. He is every man’s secret” – and women more rational. “If we don’t cut these lying swines a bit of slack,” Lily’s friend tells her, “we’ll die lonely.”
The book proceeds like this, wandering from aphorism to snappy dialogue and back again, and it’s such fun to read that only occasionally does the reader look up and think, where are we again? The sense arrives, as it has before, that plotting is either beneath or beyond Jacobson: one chapter is much like the next. But there are developments: time moves on, Sam and Lily age, their relationship finds surprising new modes. One moment he asks her to slap him during sex, like a reverse Marianne and Connell in Normal People; the next they’re frequenting fetish clubs, places “for weary London taxi drivers to show off their wives’ piercings”.
And there’s a frisson underneath: if Lily does get free of Hal, if Sam leaves Selena (“the scent of war has entered their negotiations”), “what will fill the hours they used to put into dodging and lying?” So there are elements that could give rise to dramatic set pieces, but as ever with Jacobson, the action is internal and the drama is all in the dialogue. There are brilliant exchanges on male friendship, on not having children, which flow with brightly lit truth. So, yes, it’s another novel about love and sex, about men and women, from the leading specialist in his field, but which by its end has matured into something more subtle and melancholy than expected. In the best possible way, fans of Howard Jacobson will not be disappointed.
What Will Survive of Us by Howard Jacobson is published by Jonathan Cape (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
