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The Finkler Question, in detail
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.
Jacobson's prose is comic in the English tradition — precise, self-aware, given to extended riffs that pause the narrative. The novel is a direct descendant of Philip Roth in its willingness to use Jewish identity as both subject and method: comedy as a way of surviving the examination of unbearable things. The comedy is not relief from the seriousness but the form it takes.
The Finkler Question won the 2010 Man Booker Prize, to the surprise of many reviewers who found it too narrow in its concerns. Readers who engage with it tend to bring some familiarity with its debates — the politics of Jewish identity in Britain and America after the second intifada. Readers who find it inaccessible often feel excluded by its assumptions. It is a more specifically situated novel than its Booker status suggests.
The big ideas
- 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.
