Novel twist from Finkler author
PRIZE-WINNING author Howard Jacobson has a strong belief in the future of novels and writing, even though the main character in his latest novel, Zoo Time, believes that fiction is dead.
“I think the novel is in good shape,” Jacobson says by phone from London. “Everyone wants to write a novel today. There is a great vibration around the novel and there are some very good novels being written all over the world. The question is whether we going to be left with a vocabulary for reading them.”
In Zoo Time, which has just been published, the narrator and protagonist is accomplished writer Guy Abelman, who is struggling to revive his career with a shock novel about an unlikely affair.
The challenge is demanding much of Abelman, who is grappling with a brave new world of publishing. The writer laments the idea of the book no longer being a “prestigious object, source of wisdom and impious disturbance”, where novels are replaced with iPhone apps and publishers demand stories about magic boys, vampires or disaster plastic surgery.
Intriguingly though, Jacobson, who in 2010 won the Man Booker Prize for The Finkler Question, insists that language is ephemeral and that fiction is a continuing innovation.
“I’m not nostalgic for what is gone,” he says. “This is not the book – insofar as it reflects where I stand – that reflects on a previous golden age.
“This isn’t a book about nostalgia at all. It’s not about saying why aren’t we writing like Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Joseph Conrad or D H Lawrence. Things must change, language must change and the ways of creating the novel must change.”
It seems that beneath it all, there is a deeper issue pressing Jacobson.
“I’m longing for readers to be able to read with courage. I want people to know that some of the greatest books and some of the greatest experiences you can have as a reader come from being energised by blasphemy, by rudeness, by impoliteness and by incorrectness. I’m asking why won’t people write with courage anymore? Where has our courage gone?”
Much of Zoo Time is set in Australia, with Broome and the Adelaide Festival taking centre stage. As Abelman travels through the country he is joined by his wife and her mother, who becomes a comical love interest.
Having written other works set in Australia, such as In The Land Of Oz, Jacobson, who spent years lecturing and teaching literature in Sydney but never attended the Adelaide Festival, explained his choice of landscape: “I felt like some sunshine.”
Jacobson’s perceptive portrayal of a mother-daughter bind swings from the comical to the tragic, while Abelman’s thoughts on literature simultaneously descend into dystopia.
When Jacobson was asked whether Abelman’s anxieties of an imminent literary wasteland mirror his own beliefs, the author stated the book is unashamedly fiction and so the landscape remains “bleaker” and the characters “preposterous”.
“It is not a story of what is – it is a story of what might be,” says Jacobson.
But he warns that symptoms of an impeding end for quality literature are beginning to surface.
“We’ve all gone soft. The idea that readers can be challenged through fiction has gone. Nobody wants to be upset by books anymore. They want to be soothed by them, they want to be comforted by them, and now millions of women want to be titillated by them …”
Asked about E L James’s bestselling Fifty Shades of Grey, Jacobson says: “I can’t believe there would be anyone out there turned on or titillated by anything so feeble. If you want to read eroticism the world is full of it … soft porn is such a cop out.”
In Zoo Time, Abelman is aghast at the “pornography” of a culture that feasts off hyperbole and perverse reality TV, but also at the hypocrisy of a culture that overemphasises matters of political correctness.
Jacobson comments: “We are drowning in ideology. Particularly now with the internet, everyone is obsessed with expressing their opinion. We are sick with opinion and we don’t always know the difference between an opinion and a judgement.
“We’re in a world in which we are told what we must believe and art is the place we go where all that is dissolved.
“The novel makes us extend beyond our belief systems, which are mainly rubbish, and our political views, which are mainly rubbish … the thing about art and, particularly the novel, is that it takes us into this wonderful dramatic world of language, where nothing stays still, nothing is certain, nothing is official, and everything is being tested. If we lose that, look at what we lose.”
In true Jacobson style, Zoo Time is laden with a healthy dose of self-parody and it traces a vivid account of a fraught mother-daughter relationship.
Jacobson, who has been married three times and admits to admiring each mother-in-law, says he has drawn on a “rich store of experience”.
“I’ve long been aware of relationships between mothers and daughters. The way they go out shopping together, the way they drink tea together, the way they dress, the way they look at each other, the friendships they endure … the mother’s feeling that the daughter has taken her life away from her and that the mother is somehow wanting to hold on to something that is not hers anymore. There is a tragedy to be written about this … I haven’t written it.”
Howard Jacobson’s Zoo Time is published by Bloomsbury. $29.99 (rrp).
REPORT by Timna Jacks
PHOTO of author Howard Jacobson