Who's Sorry Now?

June 10, 2013
In Man Booker Prize–winner (for The Finkler Question) Jacobson’s 2002 novel, only now being released in the U.S., Marvin Kreitman and Charlie Merriweather, friends for 20 years, meet once a week for dim sum. Kreitman, “the luggage baron of South London,” is married, has two teenage daughters, and any number of lovers. Charlie has always been faithful to his wife, also named Charlie, with whom he shares two children and a career—the two are coauthors of highly successful children’s books. One day Charlie shocks Kreitman by suggesting a bit of wife swapping. Kreitman doesn’t take his friend seriously until a random accident precipitates a series of farcical circumstances ending with a paradigm shift in the two couples’ relationships. Friends, lovers, and relatives are thrown into chaos as Jacobson hilariously chronicles what happens when Kreitman and Charlie look at life from new perspectives. This kind of schematic plotting might seem like the stuff of which Hollywood high-concept comedies are made. But Jacobson writes in a much looser vein and uses his situation to humorously examine various aspects of how we live now. Although the reader eventually grows weary of these solipsistic characters, Jacobson has a reliable penchant for garnering rude laughs at their expense.

July 15, 2013
Another middle-age-angst-meets-sex-romp comedy from Jacobson (The Finkler Question, 2010, etc.), that great chronicler of modern rakery. Originally published in Britain in 2002, before news of its author crossed the waters to these shores, Jacobson's shaggy dog story is a little more descriptive and a little less conversational than his more recent work. Marvin Kreitman, South London's luggage purveyor par excellence, is a picaresque lothario who just can't help being who he is: He loves women unconditionally and unreasonably, so much so that besides the four women in his life--mother, wife ("When she wasn't Oedipus she was Jocasta"), two daughters--he is desperately attempting to juggle relationships with five others. Added to this busy schedule, he keeps a standing lunch date each week with a school friend named Charlie who's always been a bit of a schlimazel ("He drooped disconsolately, like a puppy who had grown too big for its owner and been thrown onto the streets"), even though he has a stable, apparently happy marriage of long standing and enjoys some success as the author of children's books. Yet Charlie, like Kreitman (Jacobson uses the first name for the former, the last name for the latter, as if to suggest the differences in emotional age and worldliness), is vaguely dissatisfied, and he proposes an arrangement that surprises even the ever-scheming Kreitman. Before things can go too far, fate intervenes in the form of a schlemiel ("Not merely Man with No Qualities but Man with No Prospects of Qualities") who complicates things dangerously, revealing Kreitman's fixations as being the silly but eminently harmful things that they are. Things cannot help but end--well, if not badly, then in a little more disarray than when the tale began. Jacobson is often likened to Philip Roth, but there's plenty of Isaac Bashevis Singer in his somewhat weary understanding of the human condition. Fans won't be disappointed.

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July 1, 2013

Charlie Merriweather has been married to the same woman, also named Charlie, for 20 years; together they write a successful children's book series. Feeling restless and trapped and looking for a no-strings-attached sexual encounter, he turns to his friend Marvin Kreitman, known for his promiscuity with women of various ages, none of them his wife. Charlie begs Marvin to "give" him one of his ladies. In a complex turn of events, and almost by accident, the men swap wives, causing chaos and confusion among families, friends, and lovers until Charlie and his wife reconcile. VERDICT Man Booker Prize-winning novelist Jacobson (The Finkler Question) draws unique and unusual characters upended by the confusion of middle age; the inner workings of their ambitions and motivations are revealed through dense and cerebral prose. His work will appeal to readers of complex fiction and those who like to explore the psychology behind human actions.--Joanna Burkhardt, Univ. of Rhode Island Libs., Providence

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