Hermit Book Club #2

Jacobson, Howard. The Finkler Question. New York: Bloomsbury, 2010.

I put off this entry for a week or so, and although I told myself it wasn't because I didn't have a grasp on my conclusions about the book at hand, that's pretty much the case. This is the sixth opening paragraph I've tried.

So Treslove is your hero, except he's far from it. Mourning for his lack of loss, he envies two friends who have lost their wives. They are Jews, and he is not, and a great deal is made of this fact. And there is also a mugging.

The Finkler Question is the Jewish question,¹ and the novel would be at home in any course on Jewish Identity in the Modern World. Which is to say: for all its narrative maneuvers (they are slight but sharply executed) Jacobson has written something other than a straightforward story, full stop. To call it a treatise, which I was about to do, would also be off-target, since part of its success is a convolution of who-said-what ideas and principles; part of the problem is tying down any one view, or standing on it as a platform. The characters' positions and temperaments -- proud Jew, ashamed Jew, envious Gentile, Jew in mourning, Jew in training, Gentile within Jew (and vice versa) -- float upward naturally from what we are told of the men, but rarely do they remain buoyant.

Which is to say: I buy wholesale the self-examining and -questioning at every turn, and there is much of it, even if it paints these men as ideological hypochondriacs. The novel positions their hemmin' and hawin' in tension with some vague sense of time marching on; you begin to wonder if the spiritual/religious and social/political dilemmas Treslove and his friends dwell on are made obsolete by their dwelling on them -- if the parade has gone by.

Which it has. Even stripped of the Jewish question, Jacobson's novel wrenches the gut as a story of lost time. Which, of course, is not the problem of one people. And so when characters make it exclusive, well, that's kind of the point. I don't know. I have a much easier time with Phillip Roth.

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¹ The definite article is slippery but serves a purpose: Treslove's view of Jewish identity is as limited as it is idealized. Contrast that with the author's presentation of conflicting self-identifications rubrics, and hey, you've got yourself an essay.