Coming From Behind

This is a superb comic novel. Jacobson snuffles down with a cosy evisceration of a Jewish lecturer's mid life crisis (or rather, stagnation) at a hillariously imagined moribund Wrottesley Polytechnic in the Midlands. Jacobson satirises the vanities of ambition with great wit, and packs the novel with witty and erudite insights into the male condition. Especially that of the middle aged Jewish intellectual male, who cannot for various reasons fully integrate with the pastoral cottage dwelling lifestyles of his fellow lecturers in the Midlands. Jacboson can be intelligent, scabrous, and packs a superb talent for analysing the world around him- a sort of English comic Bellow: the shaping of Cockey minds by Dickens, the reason why Jews don't like sport, the temptations and perils of High Church Cambridge, the description of a man leaning forward in prayer to drink coffee in the staffroom. Jacobson is a man who notices. This is a cosy campus novel very much reminiscent of Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim. It is about not fitting in, and striving for something better in your life, even though your circumstances are actually fine in the scheme of things. Jacobson's Sefton is like Lucky Jim in that his talent is really for being funny in a close knit circle, benefiting others not necessarily solely himself - the difference between the little guy and the small man. A word of warning: this is a novel slathered in the rather parochial and specific English Literature tradition, as shaped by the 1960s. Hence you may be a little bewildered if you are not familiar with D.H. Lawrence, the structuralism/post structuralism debates, and the colossal significance of F.R. Leavis for Cambridge educated men of Jacboson's generation, you may be a little at sea. As Will Self has observed, the smug cosiness of this nexus of people (specifically their belief that they, and only they are qualified to read and write novels) is annoying. Jacobson's later fiction has broadened out from this slightly, but he does remain very much one of these people.

Howard Jacobson's "Coming from Behind" is not only the funniest "campus" novel ever written, it is one of the great comic novels of the past half century. Because it is closely based on his own experiences as a Mancunian Jew in High Church Cambridge and as a neophyte lecturer at Wolverhampton polytechnic, Jacobson's satire is far more acute and therefore side-splitingly funny than anything written by Bradbury, Lodge or Amis.