Shylock Is My Name

November 30, 2015
In the second Hogarth retelling of Shakespeare (following Jeanette Winterson’s retelling of The Winter’s Tale), Booker winner Jacobson plunks an unchanged Shylock into present-day suburban Manchester for a take on The Merchant of Venice. When businessman and philanthropist Simon Strulovitch meets Shylock, he’s fascinated: who better to talk through his Jewish issues with? Shakespeare’s other characters get updated: Antonio is an art dealer who does favors for handsome men, among them versions of Bassanio and Gratiano—one a dopey boy toy, the other a dopier footballer. When Gratiano (here named Gratan) begins dating Strulovitch’s daughter, the question arises whether Gratan will convert, which would involve circumcision. Jacobson isn’t cheating—the circumcision is one reading of the famous pound of flesh—but here it’s the engine of the plot. The other, bigger problem is Portia, whom Jacobson recreates as a reality-show host named Anna Livia Plurabelle Cleopatra A Thing Of Beauty Is A Joy Forever Christine. This dim Portia cheats the play and saps the book’s power: there’s not much conflict when one side (Shylock and Strulovitch) has all the good lines. When Shylock and Strulovitch are swapping jokes, stories, and fears, the tale is energetic, but Jacobson’s dutiful unfolding of the original plot dissipates the book’s force, making it more of a curio than a work that stands on its own.

December 15, 2015
A novelization of The Merchant of Venice set in contemporary England touches on foreskins, art collectors, athletes, and troublesome daughters. This is Man Booker Prize winner Jacobson's (J, 2014, etc.) contribution to the Hogarth Shakespeare series in which writers are asked to reimagine one of the plays. He opens in a cemetery where a wealthy Jewish art collector named Strulovitch is visiting his late mother and pondering the latest misadventure of his teenage daughter, Beatrice. Nearby, reading to his buried wife from Portnoy's Complaint, stands Shylock, transported (by Tardis?) from a script written under Elizabeth I to pages in the reign of QE II. The father of the play's rebellious Jessica agrees to be a houseguest of Strulovitch, which allows the men to wax angry and eloquent on obstreperous offspring, anti-Semitism, and, ultimately, what penalty one can exact from the randy Christian jock with whom Beatrice has run off. Playing Antonio and middleman between father and daughter is an obnoxious aesthete named D'Anton with whom Strulovitch has clashed over a Jewish art museum. D'Anton's partner in crude anti-Semitism is an inane version of Portia as wealthy socialite with a TV show in which she serves food and renders Judge Judy-type dispute resolutions. The legal gotcha here is supplied by Shylock, as both adviser and doppelganger to Strulovitch, who is pondering a different pound of flesh. The Merchant is well-suited to Jacobson, a Philip Roth-like British writer known for his sterling prose and Jewish themes. It's hard to say whether his novel stands well on its own, as the play permeates it with quotes, characters, allusions, plot elements, and that touch of magical realism that imports every pound of Shylock in the fictional flesh. The book is also full of the facile asides and riffs for which Jacobson has been praised and spanked--comic patter that pales amid the fine, thoughtful talk when his two heroes hold forth in this uneven effort.

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September 15, 2015

Launching this fall with Jeanette Winterson's The Gap of Time, the Hogarth Shakespeare project offers contemporary retellings of Shakespeare's plays. And who better to channel The Merchant of Venice than the Man Booker Prize-winning Jacobson, whose writings focus on the Jewish experience in England? Here, art dealer Simon Strulovitch is angry with his daughters, Jessica for rejecting her Jewish roots and Beatrice for swooning over Manchester high society and a footballer who gives the Nazi salute on the playing field. But how will Strulovitch demand his pound of flesh?

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