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.
