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The 81-year-old Howard Jacobson is often referred to as “the English Philip Roth” for his sardonic humour, skirt-chasing protagonists and focus on Jewish identity. But while in his later years Roth turned from libidinous men to American history and mortality, Jacobson is sticking with the pursuit of love — albeit with a softer, if not downright soppy, bent (the whips and ropes lacing his new novel notwithstanding).
Jacobson himself prefers comparisons to Jane Austen. If the protagonists of the author’s last novel Live a Little (2019) resemble Pride and Prejudice’s Elizabeth and Darcy in overcoming their mutual initial dislike, those in his new book What Will Survive of Us are perhaps a version of Jane and Bingley. “Kerpow!” writes Jacobson of his protagonists’ mid-life meet-cute, on page one. “How she kept her balance she didn’t know.”
Fortysomethings Lily, an award-winning TV producer, and Sam, a “once-Wunderkind” playwright, meet to discuss collaborating on a film about DH Lawrence. Although both are in long-term relationships, they embark on an affair while shooting the documentary in Taos. Their at-first gentle coupling gives way to a sadomasochistic dynamic, in which Sam discovers he enjoys being submissive. (“Mistress. The belt she wielded made the very word shudder. Whisper it, but she was his mistress in every sense.”) As one of the book’s characters observes, “older doesn’t mean quieter”.
While Lily’s partner Hal is happy to turn a blind eye — quietly re-closing her bag of kink accoutrements when he opens it by mistake — Sam’s wife Selena is up in arms about the affair. But the outside world has little bearing, and the ancillary characters, as such, remain under-developed. Although Jacobson is perhaps brave to broach S&M — which also featured in The Act of Love, his 2008 tale of sexual obsession and, more controversially, in a concentration camp fantasy in Kalooki Nights (2006) — here the exploration of power dynamics remains skin-deep.
The pair take to attending leather and PVC parties, until a dangerous encounter with an “Hermès-scarf fetishist” in London brings their masquerading chapter to a close (and Sam’s submission with it). The incident incites them to leave their partners and be together — at which point the plot flags. Jacobson is aware of the challenge of making happily-ever-after engaging on the page, noting here that “happiness fares poorly in the literature of love”. He has never been a plotty writer, but elsewhere in his oeuvre the prose is propulsive enough to carry the reader forward. Here, not so much.
The book’s title comes from the oft-quoted ending of Philip Larkin’s “An Arundel Tomb”, which serves as its epigraph: “Our almost-instinct almost true: / What will survive of us is love”. The poem describes a monument topped by two marble effigies of the count and countess buried within, holding hands for eternity. Uncharacteristically mawkish, the romanticism of the line made Larkin, for one, ambivalent about the poem. Jacobson, by contrast, seems to take it at face value. “Love isn’t just all you need but all there is,” Sam thinks. “The rest is death.”
Jacobson is best known for his explorations of identity, such as in the 2010 Man Booker Prize-winning The Finkler Question — but thematically What Will Survive of Us most resembles his late-life love story Live a Little. Although Sam and Lily’s dialogue is an improvement on the strangely stilted exchanges in its predecessor, What Will Survive of Us loses in its lack of humour.
Jacobson has said that in dropping the shtick, he hopes to move readers emotionally. But humour isn’t necessarily distancing. There, it made the reader empathise with the physical indignities of ageing borne by the pair; without it, we don’t quite warm to Lily and Sam as Jacobson jump-cuts to their physical failings 20 years on.
Instead, tenderness tips towards saccharine. “Something out of the ordinary, something exorbitant, had happened,” writes Jacobson of the affair, placing the lovers “under a fearsomely large orange moon, joined at last as though dreading ever to be unjoined again”. It’s unusual to come across such unabashed sentimentality in contemporary literary fiction; in Sally Rooney’s 2017 debut, Conversations with Friends, the protagonist tells her married love interest, “we can sleep together if you want, but you should know I’m only doing it ironically”.
Billed as a “provocative look at infidelity”, What Will Survive of Us appears to be at least partially autobiographically inspired. The book is dedicated to Jacobson’s third and, apparently, “last” wife Jenny De Yong, a former TV director whom he met while collaborating on an adaptation of his book In The Land of Oz. We know from his memoir Mother’s Boy (2022) that the break-up with his second wife, the Australian academic Rosalin Sadler, was “anguished and prolonged”.
It is not a moral question that irks, however. Whatever its origins, the shortcomings of What Will Survive of Us are literary. With Jacobson’s comedic arm tied behind his back, the book lacks the stylistic flair of the author at his Rothian best. What will survive of us is not love, I would argue, but literature.
What Will Survive of Us by Howard Jacobson, Jonathan Cape £20, 304 pages
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