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What it argues
The Finkler Question opens with Julian Treslove, a failed actor turned celebrity lookalike, being mugged by a woman who he believes calls him a Jew as she flees. He is not Jewish. His two closest friends — Sam Finkler, a celebrity philosopher, and Libor Sevcik, an elderly retired journalist — are. From this absurd starting point, Jacobson builds a novel about what it means to want to belong to an identity that is not yours, and what it means to belong to one that is increasingly contested.
The novel's actual subject is identity in its most contentious mode. Finkler is a founder of a Jewish group opposed to Israeli policy — Ashamed Jews, they call themselves — and his anti-Zionism becomes a battleground for the novel's central argument about whether criticism of Israel can be separated from antisemitism, and whether performing Jewish self-criticism is a form of self-hatred, a form of moral clarity, or both simultaneously. Libor, the elderly widower, represents the generation that lived through the Holocaust's immediate aftermath, and his grief — for his dead wife, for European Jewry — grounds the novel's comedy in something heavy. Treslove, the non-Jewish outsider, is the novel's readerly proxy: he wants to be Jewish, cannot understand what that would mean, and the novel is partly his education in its complexity.
What it gets right
- 1.
The novel makes the uncomfortable argument that the desire to belong to an oppressed identity can itself be a form of self-aggrandizement — Treslove's Jewishness-envy is at least partly about wanting a meaningful story.
- 2.
Jacobson stages the debate about Jewish anti-Zionism not to resolve it but to inhabit its difficulty. Both Finkler's position and Libor's counter-position are given real weight.
- 3.
Grief is the novel's emotional undertow. Both Finkler and Libor have lost their wives, and their different ways of managing that loss shape their different relationships to collective identity.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Howard Jacobson was born in Manchester in 1942 and studied at Cambridge under F.R. Leavis. He is one of Britain's foremost comic novelists, with a body of work that includes Coming from Behind, The Mighty Walzer, and Kalooki Nights, all of which concern Jewish British life with forensic wit. The Finkler Question, published in 2010, won the Man Booker Prize and brought him a wide readership. He writes a regular column for The Independent. He has been shortlisted for the Booker multiple times and is often described as the English Philip Roth.
