http://www.newstatesman.com/books/2008/10/howard-jacobson-love-felix
Books
Bah, Humbert
Alyssa McDonald
Published 02 October 2008
The Act of Love
Howard Jacobson
Jonathan Cape, 306pp, £17.99
Felix Quinn, antiquarian bookseller and narrator of The Act of Love, is a masochist of sorts. And so, he insists, is everyone else: “No husband is ever happy – truly, genitally happy, happy at the very heart of himself as a husband – until he has proof positive that another man is fucking her.” You can almost see the flourish of Howard Jacobson’s fountain pen as he jotted down that racy little number.
If you enjoy this kind of truism, then lucky you: there are another 300 pages of overblown pronouncements to chew through. Clearly we’re supposed to be laughing along with Jacobson at his central character’s pomposity, as Felix voyeuristically tries to engineer a torrid affair between his wife, Marisa, and Marius, a man he decides on a whim is “as sexually disordered as I”. But the humour which lit up Jacobson’s last novel, Kalooki Nights, is generally mistimed here, and just as forced as the theme of sexual taboo at the heart of the story.
Felix seems to have been conceived as a sort of Humbert Humbert – or Pervert Pervert, as Quinn sniggeringly alludes. Defined by his sexual preferences, he’s also a self-obsessed, unreliable and excruciatingly pretentious narrator. But Nabokov’s hero is also sympathetic and believable; Felix is just a bore.
