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The rest is Commentary...
Every month, Commentary explores a key Jewish thinker or writer, with a brief biography, an introduction to their major works, and suggestions for further reading. Enjoy!
Author of the Month for June
| HOWARD JACOBSON was born in Manchester in 1942 and grew up in a poor, Jewish area of the city. He was educated at Cambridge University where he studied English under F. R. Leavis, and shortly after graduating he left England and travelled to Australia where he lectured at the University of Sydney for three years. On returning to England, Howard took a post at Selwyn College, Cambridge. During the 1970s he taught English at Wolver- |
Howard Jacobson |
| hampton Polytechnic in the West Midlands, an experience which provided the material for his first novel, Coming From Behind (1983). The Mighty Walzer (1999), set in the Jewish community in Manchester during the 1950s, won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for comic writing and the Jewish Quarterly Literary Prize for Fiction in 2000. Who's Sorry Now, (2002) and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Women are central to his novels; they are the world around which his men orbit. He is our funniest, most overlooked, most furious living writer. | |
Essential Reading
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The Making of Henry
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One day, out of the blue, Henry Nagel inherits a sumptuous apartment in St John's Wood. Divine intervention? Or his late father's love nest? Henry doesn't know, but he is glad to escape the North. After nearly sixty years of angry disappointment, Henry's life is about to change. Not that the ghosts of Henry's past are prepared to disappear without a struggle - his old school-friend and rival Osmond 'Hovis' Belkin, currently enjoying success in Hollywood, his tragic great aunt Marghanita for whom Henry once entertained a dangerous passion, and his father Izzi, upholsterer turned illusionist, fire-eater and origamist, whose shade Henry interrogates relentlessly. But the present clamours as loudly as the past. His dyspeptic neighbour Lachlan wants his sympathy, Lachlan's sloppy red setter, Angus, wants a walk, and Moira, the waitress with the crooked smile and custard hair, seems to want him. Kicking and screaming every inch of the way, Henry realises he might finally be falling in love.
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From the beginning, Oliver Walzel is a natural - at ping-pong; he can chop, flick and half-volley like a champion. At sex he is not a natural, but with tuition his game improves. This is the story of coming-of-age in 1950s Manchester.
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Who's Sorry Now |
Marvin Kreitman, the luggage baron of South London, lives for sex. Or at least he lives for women. At present he loves four women - his mother, his wife Hazel, and his two daughters - and is in love with five more. Charlie Merriweather, on the other hand, nice Charlie, loves just the one woman, also called Charlie, the wife with whom he has been writing children's books and having nice sex for twenty years. Once a week the two friends meet for a Chinese lunch, contriving never quite to have the conversation they would like to have - about fidelity and womanising, and which makes you happier. Until today. It is Charlie who takes the dangerous step of asking for a piece of Marvin's disordered life, but what follows embroils them all, the wives no less than the husbands. And none of them will ever be the same again.
Coming from Behind
No More Mr. Nice Guy Frank Ritz is a television critic. His partner, Melissa Paul, is the author of pornographic novels for liberated women. He watches crap all day; she writes crap all day. It’s a life. Or it was a life. But now they’re fighting, locked in oral combat. He won’t shut up and she is putting her finger down her throat again. So there’s only one thing for it. Frank has to go.But go where? And do what? Frank Ritz has been on heat more or less continuously since he could speak his own name. Let him out of the house and his first instinct is to go looking for sex. Deviant sex, treacherous sex, even straight sex, so long as it’s immoderate - he’s never been choosy. But what happens when sex is all you know but no longer what you want? Previous
Authors of the Month
PB £6.99
Sefton Goldberg: mid-thirties, English teacher at Wrottesley Poly in the West Midlands; small, sweaty, lustful, definatly unappreciative of beer, nature and organised games; gnawingly aware of being an urban Jew islanded in a sea of country-loving Anglo-Saxons. Obsessed by failure - morbidly, in his own case, gloatingly, in that of his contemporaries - so much so that he plans to write a bestseller on the subject. In the meantime he is uncomfortably aware of advancing years and atrophying achievement, and no amount of lofty rationalisation can disguise the triumph of friends and colleagues, not only from Cambridge days but even within the despised walls of the Poly itself, or sweeten the bitter pill of another's success.
PB £6.99
Abraham Joshua Heschel
