Howard Jacobson's The Finkler Question won the 2010 Man Booker Prize for fiction. Many people a lot smarter than I am have analyzed this book in depth, so I'm not going to do that. Any book about self-hating Jews and anti-Semitism is bound to generate a lot of discussion, and I am certain I have nothing new to add.
I am just interested in the reading experience, and for me, this reading experience was less than satisfying. Here are some good things about this book: The narrator is funny and has a strong original voice. He manages his characters with an ironic detachment and provides amusing commentary on them, which I enjoyed.
Here are some bad things: His unpleasant characters just go on and on and on and they never shut up. Hardly anything ever happens except for a few nasty incidents that get blown out of proportion by the self-absorbed people who experience them. I couldn't stand those parts.
Apparently this book is a roman à clef, with several characters who are obvious parodies of well-known British academics and pundits. Since I am almost totally unfamiliar with the 21st Century British intelligentsia, all those references passed me by completely. If you want, you could try to explore than angle, too, but I can't be bothered. I've had enough of these folks.
