Howl by Howard Jacobson review – a tragicomic portrait of a Jewish man’s despair

A suburban headteacher navigates antisemitism in Gaza-outraged London in Jacobson’s latest novel

Howard Jacobson writes characters at their wits’ end; those characters are usually men, and those men are usually Jewish. Additionally, and problematically for both them and everyone around them, their collective wits are capacious: easily enlarged to allow idiosyncrasy to bloom into neurosis, preoccupation into obsession. And Jacobson’s men do the opposite of suffering in silence (although they do that too); they are much given to exhaustive and exhausting disputation, to arguing their point long after their interlocutors are longing for bed, and not in the fun way all parties might hope.

With its straightforward allusion to another Jewish writer’s witness to anguish, Howl appears to make its intentions apparent from the outset: we are located in the world of mental dissolution, of consciousness strained and subsequently fractured. But rather than Allen Ginsberg’s would-be seekers of enlightenment, disappearing into the volcanoes of Mexico and “scattering their semen freely” through rose gardens and cemeteries,Jacobson’s avatar is a somewhat prim, suburban primary school headteacher, driven to distraction not by free love and copious hallucinogens, but by fizzing anger and agonising guilt.