Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%
Memoir

Howard’s end

A Booker winner recalls life in Sydney
by •
July 2022, no. 444

Mother’s Boy: A writer’s beginnings by Howard Jacobson

Jonathan Cape, $39.99 hb, 280 pp

Memoir

Howard’s end

A Booker winner recalls life in Sydney
by •
July 2022, no. 444

A Writer’s Beginnings begins: ‘My mother died today.’ One could be excused for thinking that one was reading not a memoir but a Campus Novel without the ‘p’, an experience that Howard Jacobson will suffer later in this book. Who could read this incipit without hearing the famous beginning: ‘Aujourd’hui maman est morte. Ou peut-être hier, je ne sais pas.’ Jacobson, on the other hand, knows. He continues: ‘It is 3 May 2020. She is ninety-seven years old.’ I cannot recall whether Albert Camus specifies his protagonist’s mother’s age in L’Étranger (1942). A Camus novel is surely a Campus Novel without the ‘p’, the latter a sub-genre that Jacobson will both live out teaching English at a polytechnic in a defunct football stadium and come to write. Indeed, so insistent is his use of the locution ‘we’ll come to that later’ that one could be excused for thinking prolepsis a Finklerish (see below) rhetorical device. Give Howard Jacobson enough trope and he’ll surely hang himself.

Leave a comment
Author avatar default image

Don Anderson is the author/editor of eight books, collections of essays and reviews, and anthologies of prose, largely of texts from the Americas, Australia, and Europe. For fourteen years in the 1980s and 1990s he was a regular literary columnist in the National Times and the Sydney Morning Herald. He was for thirty years a member of the English department at the University of Sydney, where he taught American, Irish, and Australian literature, and literary theory. He was for some years a member of the Advisory Panel of ABR.

From the New Issue

You May Also Like

Comments (2)

  • This review had some very funny lines (t/rope!), and I'm all for a final flourish, but it is unclear what the last sentence is implying. Is it a joke insinuating that Jews are over-sensitive about anti-Semitism? That Jews are allowed to be over-sensitive if they are witty and artful in their paranoia? That Jacobson construed any disagreement with him during his time at USYD as anti-Semitism? That they are too many Jews in academia? Or that academics hate Jews? I'll stick with Mel Brooks for my Jewish jokes.
    Posted by Gabriella Edelstein
    06 October 2022
  • This might have been an engaging review had it gone on to actually consider the Jacobson memoir in question rather than discoursing on the long-past intra-academic hostilities engaged in by Anderson and Jacobson. Fortunately it does mention Jacobson’s first novel, which was a real hoot of satirical ribaldry regarding such arcane rivalries as to have me chortling and choking with laughter. It was written long before Jacobson started to take himself too seriously. Anderson could have navigated from there through Jacobson’s works to get to ‘Mother’s Boy’ and given your readers something of more informative substance.
    Posted by Leslie Rosenblatt
    03 July 2022

Leave a comment

If you are an ABR subscriber, you will need to sign in to post a comment.

If you have forgotten your sign in details, or if you receive an error message when trying to submit your comment, please email your comment (and the name of the article to which it relates) to ABR Comments. We will review your comment and, subject to approval, we will post it under your name.

Please note that all comments must be approved by ABR and comply with our Terms & Conditions.