live a little by howard jacobson

evening standard 11 july 2019

Howard Jacobson’s previous novel, Pussy, was a hastily written response to the election of Donald Trump. I can’t help but feel he could have left his new novel, Live a Little, to brew a little longer too. 

Things begin promisingly enough: Beryl Dusinbery is to all intents and purposes a wicked old woman near the end of her life. She fancies herself as a filicide, or at least claims to have named her sons Pen and Sandy after Pentheus and Tisander (figures from Greek mythology who were both murdered by their mothers, Agave and Medea respectively). 

Shimi Carmelli is an elderly bachelor much sought after by the widows of north London as his hands are steady enough for him to do up his own flies (which is lucky, given how frequently he needs to urinate). He uses a deck of cards to predict the future to Jewish widows every Friday night in a Chinese restaurant in Finchley Road. 

Beryl is preoccupied by provoking her sons, castigating her foreign carers and gleefully stitching morbid quotes on to samplers, “though the only thing her fingers want to stitch is death”. The two meet outside a crematorium at Shimi’s estranged brother’s funeral. They are an unlikely couple: she frequently appears shameless whereas he is embarrassed by everything, not least the haunting memory of masturbating on the morning of his beloved mother’s funeral. 

Jacobson has fun with Beryl, who attributes her sons’ successful careers to her negligent mothering and reckons herself to be a great beauty: “I can tell you the second man to marry me fainted when he saw me coming towards him in my wedding gown and tiara. It took half an hour to bring him round.”

There is less hilarity but more tenderness in Jacobson’s portrayal of Shimi, who was shouted at as a boy by his teachers for looking out of the window: “They called it daydreaming; Shimi called it thinking at his own speed.”

The first half of the novel zips along irreverently but a comedy whose jokes increasingly fail to hit their mark, while plot and character remain underdeveloped, can make rather wearing reading. Shimi, knowing that the end of his life is near, hopes to see “that there’s a shape to it all, like the end of a good mystery story, when you see why everything happened as it did”. 

I know how he feels.

This review first appeared in The Evening Standard