Books & Poetry

The title of Howard Jacobson’s latest novel doesn’t quite do justice to the story. Kalooki is a card game played to distraction by the mother of the book’s narrator, Maxie Glickman. Thankfully, it doesn’t actually feature much in this thoughtful and sharply funny book. Instead, Jacobson gives us a murder mystery – of sorts – and something of a confessional; but above all the novel is about obsessive Jewishness, approached in an obsessively and inescapably Jewish way. (Jacobson has called it ‘the most Jewish novel that has ever been written by anybody, anywhere.’)  

Maxie Glickman is a cartoonist, whose work deals with Jewishness up close and painfully personal. Take, for example, his magnum opus, ‘Five Thousand Years of Bitterness’, a history of crimes committed against the Jewish people: neither Jews nor Gentiles know quite what to  make of it. Maxie, now in jaded middle age, weaves his own story around the shocking life of his childhood friend, Manny Washinsky, who gassed his own parents. Their neighbourhood (Crumpsall in Manchester) in the 1950s is evoked with nostalgia and claustrophobia; their generation’s response to the still-recent holocaust is suggested in every line.

But like all the best cartoonists, Jacobson is able to make you laugh as well as plunge you deep into the most uncomfortable taboos. ‘Kalooki Nights’ draws on the rich history of Jewish cartooning: not only Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel, creators of Superman, but also Art Spiegelman (creator of ‘Maus’) and Bernie Krigstein, both of whom address the holocaust directly in their work, using what Maxie describes as the ‘trivial form’ of cartoons for this most sombre theme.

And this is just what Jacobson does so successfully in his ‘comic’ novels. ‘Kalooki Nights’ is the clearest indication he has given that just because he’s funny, it doesn’t mean he’s not serious.