HOWARD JACOBSON reading with MAX LAYTON, BEN LERNER, DONNA MORRISSEY and ALIX OHLIN October 26, 8 pm and reading and being interviewed by Dan Friedman on October 28, noon.
It might seem odd to follow up your Man Booker Prize-winning novel with a scathing satire about the dying days of the publishing industry.
But before winning that award in 2010 for his smart comic novel The Finkler Question, Howard Jacobson was at a career low point, and he channelled his despair into the book that would eventually become Zoo Time.
“I was feeling dejected about writing and the industry,” he says amiably from his home in London, England. “Bookshops were closing. In America I saw people carrying entire shelves out of a Borders store.”
He even considered abandoning fiction altogether.
“I was thinking about doing more journalism and TV. I just didn’t feel like I was prospering. And then I got the idea of putting all my feelings about the industry into a book about it.”
He was halfway through Zoo Time – which recounts the darkly funny obsessions of sex-crazed, middle-aged mid-list author Guy Ableman – when he found himself accepting the Booker.
The win, of course, led to interviews, tours, readings and international interest in his considerable backlist.
“I was high on that prize, travelling, having a really good time and feeling, ‘Isn’t it great?'”
After four months, when he found he missed writing, he picked up the novel-in-progress. Had things changed overall just because he’d had a good year?
Of course not. So Jacobson attacked the book with renewed vigour, detailing all the things he still hated: nasty book clubs (the novel opens with a scene where Guy’s eviscerated for not using gender-non-specific pronouns and creating “identifiable” characters), inane Amazon reviews and fads about boy wizards, substance abuse and vampires.
One of the strangest trends he’s noticed lately is how marketers don’t like the words “funny” and “hilarious” applied to books.
“My agent and publisher told me funny doesn’t sell,” he says. “Apparently, people did not want to go to literature to laugh. Reading had to be this sacred activity where you were moved and stirred. And yet comedians here perform to audiences of 15,000, whereas a novelist who gets 500 at a reading thinks he’s doing pretty well.”
On the subject of readings, Jacobson’s narrator, Guy, tosses a few barbs at literary festivals, groupies and one pompous writer who stays silent for an hour only to receive an ovation.
“I’ve always liked [literary festivals],” admits Jacobson. “There’s a part of me that would be a comedian. And I like to think what I write reads well. I do feel I haven’t got something right if I can’t hear it, if I’ve moved too far away from the spoken word.”
One of Guy’s darkest musings about book fairs and festivals, however, concerns the advanced age of the people who attend them. At one point he says festival organizers should add on a funeral home to the reading venue – just in case.
“I’m aged myself, but I’m often the youngest person in the room,” says Jacobson. “You do worry about whether all of them are going to make it out alive.”
On the other hand, he also enjoys attending more casual kinds of literary soirees held in bars and nightclubs.
“But sometimes I wonder if the reading event has become a substitute for actually reading a book.”
Interview Clips
Howard Jacobson on writing Zoo Time and rediscovering his “youthful verve”
On whether he kept a notebook about all the things in the literary business that upset him:
On the endorsement of young American writer Jonathan Safran Foer (who said about him: “I don’t know a funnier writer alive”), and on being read in America:
On the idea that characters have to be “likeable” or “identifiable”:
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