The Hampstead adultery novel is an extinct species that is constantly turning out, like the coelacanth, not to be extinct at all. I mean, of course, the sort of novel that tells you about middle-class London media professionals sleeping with people who aren’t their spouses – Iris Murdoch wrote several of the best (see, among others, 1961’s A Severed Head). There’s probably no getting away from it, at least until climate change renders cities uninhabitable and media careers unlikely. After all, novelists are often middle-class media professionals who live in London, and sometimes they sleep with people who aren’t their spouses.
And complaints about the adultery novel are almost as old as the adultery novel itself. “There are other [subjects],” Henry James wrote in 1899, “than those of the eternal triangle of the husband, the wife, and the lover.” He had been ploughing through a batch of recent French novels. What would he have made of Howard Jacobson’s latest? What Will Survive of Us is about Sam and Lily, who have an affair. Sam is “an arts-page celebrity” – that is, a vaguely Stoppardian playwright (his big hit is called Ibsen in Sorrento). Lily directs TV documentaries (“Though she doesn’t always work for the BBC, everything about her programmes suggests the BBC”). Sam is married to Selena. Lily cohabits sexlessly with Hal. Everyone lives, of course, in London.
James might have noted that the triangle principle isn’t really operative here. Even the idea of a square – two spouses, two lovers – doesn’t figure. “Kerpow!” Lily thinks, when she first sees Sam – such is the sheer force of her attraction (“a single blast of him was all it took”); and the novel is really about the two of them, intensely, claustrophobically. Selena and Hal – poor hovering ghosts – barely get a look in.
The twist, if you can call it that, is that Lily and Sam are in their late 40s when their affair begins. Neither has children, and so no school runs or family dinners inhibit their burgeoning passion; the spouses are disposed of with technical, if not quite emotional, ease; and the novel follows the lovers from their first meeting, in 1995, to “nowish”, accompanying them through middle age and into the twilight zone (a spoiler warning for the closing pages is hardly needed – by that stage, it’s really just a question of who).
When we meet Sam, he “is to fame what torn jeans are to fashion”; Lily is “in the prime of her early middle age, with stormy eyes and that commodious brow” (as Sam puts it to himself). Lily is producing a series about writers in exile. She wants Sam to present an episode about DH Lawrence’s early 1920s visits to Taos, New Mexico. They meet, are attracted, hesitate – then plunge in, not in Taos but in nearby Albuquerque, as they wait for Lily’s camera crew to fly in (“They find each other’s hands in the dark”). A kind of omniscient narrator, much given to literary epigram (“Happy endings should neither be begrudged nor scattered like confetti”), hops heads: now Lily, now Sam. Things get kinky. Lily buys Sam a “plaited leather belt with a snake buckle”; this she uses to tie him up during sex. They graduate to visiting leather clubs, BDSM dungeons.
Things also get a bit icky: “At first they thought it profligacy to expend the little time they had in conversation instead of lovemaking until they realised the conversation WAS the lovemaking. He eased himself into her in words.” That last phrase is much more squirm-inducing than any amount of frankly described BDSM. Besides, in the sex-positive 2020s, BDSM clubs have rather lost their transgressive bona fides, though Jacobson’s point is less about transgression than extremes of passion, and what happens to obsessive sexual love as the body’s powers wane with age.
The Lawrence element is the clue. What Will Survive of Us (the Larkinian title, quoting An Arundel Tomb, is really a feint) is a Hampstead adultery novel as Lawrence might have conceived it. But where Lawrence’s sons and lovers were young, Jacobson’s are getting on in years. Where Lawrence’s settings were pastoral, Jacobson’s are urban. Where Lawrence was parochial, Jacobson is cosmopolitan (Lily and Sam are forever jetting off to Venice, Bali, Rome).
For Lawrence, merely to have sex on the page was to transgress, and to liberate. For Jacobson, the literary freedoms won by, in part, Lady Chatterley’s Lover mean that new frontiers of extremity must be conquered. But he can’t quite decide if he wants to celebrate love and sex as intrinsically messy and unpuritanical, or to whisper, like the skull of Yorick, about the favour that awaits all beauty. The celebrations certainly seem pointed. Sam conducts a lifelong internal argument with a feminist teacher who told him that Andrew Marvell, in To His Coy Mistress, was objectifying women; to Sam, this sort of politically correct view takes all the good dirty fun out of both literature and sex. What Will Survive of Us feels at points as if it’s tilting against a now rather outmoded vein of wokery, with Lawrence, that great anti-Puritan, as Jacobson’s mascot or presiding spirit.
Whether such a fight actually needs to be fought is perhaps an open question. Less open is the question of how real Sam and Lily finally feel to the reader. What Will Survive of Us, cleaving airlessly to their ins and outs, is in many ways an enormously technically accomplished novel. But it never really manages to do the fundamental thing. It never gets you hoping that the lovers will, in the end, come through.
• 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.
