Laughing All The Way To The Wank

If author Howard Jacobson could be said to have a mission it would be to change attitudes towards the comic novel. His new book Zoo Time is very funny indeed, but the author notes that comedy is all too often seen as less accomplished than more serious works of literature.

“I am energised on the subject. It has always been a beef of mine. People say things like, ‘This is a comic novel but it’s also serious.’ That makes me want to pull my hair out!”
Jacobson is charming, articulate and great company. He is also more than a little miffed about the way comedy is written about.
“There is nothing unserious about comedy. Comedy is not the opposite of serious. It’s the opposite of solemn. Not among readers, but amongst the solemn men, the reviewers, the editors of literary magazines, there is a real thing that if you laugh, you’re betraying literature. Where does this come from? Comedy makes us question everything.”
Jacobson is best known for, yes, comic novels, such as The Act Of Love and Peeping Tom. For years he was seen as something as an underappreciated literary superstar until his last book, The Finkler Question, won the 2010 Man Booker prize.
“People were saying ‘At last a comic novel won the Booker prize.’ The Finkler Question is not a comic novel. I never thought I was writing a comic novel, I thought I was writing an angry, tragic and even political novel that had some comedy in it.”
Whereas The Finkler Question explored the relationship between three men, Zoo Time is a meta-fictional hall of mirrors. His anti-hero Guy Ableman is a writer who is writing about a writer, and who believes that literature, and the industry that supports it, is slowly but surely going the way of the dodo.
“They are heightened versions of my own feelings. The whole novel is turned up a notch. It’s not farce, but it’s ratcheted up, not beyond the likely, but beyond the actual. I wouldn’t have bothered with Guy Ableman and given him so much time if his views weren’t versions of mine. He is preposterous, but a lot of the things he says are right, or about to be right or right enough.”
Guy rails against the books that become popular – the Twilight series, the television tie-ins and celebrity memoirs. In this, Jacobson and his protagonist agree. Jacobson has a fondness for erotic or sexually transgressive themes but he is most definitely not a fan of Fifty Shades Of Grey.
“It is so ineptly written and there is no getting past that. I don’t care that it’s about sex. I think if you want to read porn, read bloody porn! Read Venus In Furs, read Bataille, read The Story Of O. The great writers of eroticism take you the whole way. She has this phrase, ‘I was so aroused.’ Gah! Can you imagine anyone in De Sade say ‘I was so aroused’? No skills whatsoever!”
“But the book is everywhere, it’s in all the magazines and the pressure on young women and young men too, that this is something they need to know about is immense. And worse than this, publishers are now looking for more of the same. Women writers turning in their manuscripts are been told ‘Go away and put some Fifty Shades type sex in it.’ We’re not annoyed enough. I think we should be bothered that there are large numbers of people reading something as bad as that.”
Zoo Time’s Guy lusts after his mother-in-law, and in some ways the novel can be seen as a parody of one of the great erotic novels, Vladimir Nabakov’s Lolita.
“Oh that’s interesting!” exclaims Jacobson. “I hadn’t thought of that but I am a keen reader of Lolita. I re-read Lolita when I was writing an earlier novel, The Act Of Love, which is a story about male masochism. I like writing about sexual extremities and oddities. That’s where the life of a novel is for me. I wasn’t thinking about it consciously when I was writing this novel, but no doubt it was in my mind. Nabakov teaches you how to write about obsession, and lure and the poetry of obsession.”
While Guy’s feelings about literature may be a reflection of Jacobson’s his desire for his mother-in-law is not.
“I’ve been married three times. I am now married for the third and final time. I’ve not always been lucky in wives. I have been lucky in mothers-in-law. I really, really liked them. I never had an affair with a mother-in-law. I always thought that would be a nice thing to write about.
“I’m interested in the dynamic of a woman and her mother. You see a woman slightly differently when you see her with her mother, and you see the mother differently too – the fondness that they have, the mutual protectiveness that at a certain point can become quite inflamed, the inevitable rivalry. I am touched by it.”
By making Poppy, a woman in her sixties, the focus of a younger man’s desire, Jacobson is challenges conventional ideas of attractiveness and eroticism.
“What is given to us as eroticism in most of our culture isn’t erotic. I have never been interested in a boy-meets-a-girl. I guess it is personal because I was never a boy-meets-a-girl boy, although from about the age of six I wanted a girlfriend. I couldn’t wait to have a girlfriend. From there on in I never felt conventionally about it. If I read a novel by a young man and it is a real story of what it is like to be nineteen and love this girl, I really don’t want to know. If it is not off the rails, I don’t want to know. Only if it is off the rails can you question our normal assumptions about sex and eroticism!”
“One of the things that literature is for is that it is the place we go to, to do what we do not do in life, to test out what we dare not test out in life. Not to recommend that we live likewise, but to see what it’s like to do the thing that we don’t have the courage or folly to do in life.”

Zoo Time is out now through Bloomsbury publishing.