Rarely has my job felt so much like goofing off than now: having to praise a selection of Howard Jacobson's columns. I would have latched on to this book and devoured it heck, even bought a copy with my own money whether or not I had a column in which I recommended good books to discriminating readers.
Then again, this is hard work. As Martin Amis is fond of pointing out every few months, the thing about reviewing writers is that reviewers, being obliged to use the same medium as the creator of the thing being reviewed, have to set themselves up as, if not equals, at least up to the task of talking something like the same language. You can evaluate the prose stylings of Jeffrey Archer in something not too far removed from baby-talk, but not those of George Eliot. And Jacobson is one of the great sentence-builders of our time. I feel I have to raise my game, even just to praise.
The double meaning of "sentence" here is important. Jacobson writes to pass judgment as much as he does to communicate meaning. You wonder whether a novelist should place his or her opinions so squarely on the page, but then do not forget and Jacobson won't let us forget that he studied English literature at the feet of FR Leavis, for whom the circles in the Venn diagram of literature, life and morality more or less entirely overlapped. Here's Jacobson on why he likes rabbis: "I am a sucker for sophistical theology. 'Ah, but do the words actually say that?' they have only to ask, and I am theirs to do with as they please. In its essentials, being a rabbi is like being a literary critic: you pick at texts, affect a deracinated Central European accent and tell people how to live."
Woe betide you if you are one of the guardians of either our culture or our broader society and produce a "shit-eating, broken-backed sentence" like the one he quotes from the government minister who said that opera needed to be reconstructed so as to make people who don't go to the opera feel less uneasy about it (the whole point about living in this country, he goes on to say, is that everyone in it is going to be made uneasy at some situation or other).
Woe betide you, too, if you decide to call an examination board EdExcel, or propose, as the National Association for the Teaching of English did, that the thriller, the romance, the crime novel and the media are all to be treated with the same, if not more, respect and attention than Shakespeare. "Crap but who are you to say it's crap," he says, thus showing that what some may accuse him of elitism is actually deep respect for people's intelligence. (And neatly reverses the direction of the charge of elitism.)
When he quotes Richard Dawkins's version of the seventh Commandment "Enjoy your own sex life (so long as it damages no one else)", and so on he does so not only in order to rail instructively against this kind of mealy-mouthed, bloodless language, but to tell us, entirely correctly, why mealy-mouthed bloodlessness like this is bad, toxic to the soul. Dawkins's Commandment "is feeble not because there is no God in it but because there is no human in it ... 'Enjoy your sex life' makes sex sound like a good breakfast."
These are deep matters, but Jacobson is also good on the more trivial matters on which it is occasionally the duty of the weekly columnist to report. Such as reading books on the beach, or what it feels like to dine alone at a restaurant, or trying to get a bank card out of a bank which tautologically demands proof that you are who you say you are, while having used their own information to get hold of you in the first place. ("Just send me the fucking card, Hilary," he is reduced to saying although I bet he didn't really swear to "Hilary", the hapless "adviser" who called him up; but sometimes the invention points to the larger truth.)
In short, he is one of the great guardians of language and culture all of it. Long may he flourish.
