No More Mr. Nice Guy

July 11, 2011
Published in England in 1998 but only now reaching the U.S., Jacobson's novel immediately plunges the reader into the rising discord between Frank, an award-winning TV critic, and his partner, Melissa, author of "feministical-erotic novels," as Frank puts it. When Mel gives him the boot, Frank, at 50, hits the road to reconnect with old friends. In Cambridge, his once successful art dealer buddy has lost everything: "Businessâin trouble. Marriageâkaput. Relations with offspringâdeeply flawed." In Gloucester, another is having an affair with his married ex-wife (an ex-lover of Frank's, as it happens). In Little Cleverley, Frank seeks out Clarice, the fulcrum of a threesome he and Melissa once had. Along the way he meets a zaftig female standup comic and ends up, incongruously, in a religious retreat, where he's given some unorthodox advice from an ex-abbot. Reminiscent of Philip Roth and Mordecai Richler at their most trenchantly vulgar, Jacobson, who won the Man Booker for The Finkler Question, writes like a Jewish Evelyn Waugh. Laugh-out-loud observations abound, but the grating Frank may test readers' patience as he meanders through his sexually disordered life.

September 1, 2011

Man Booker Prize winner Jacobson (The Finkler Question, 2010, etc.) delivers a cross-the-pond rejoinder to Philip Roth in this entertaining, sexually laden picaresque.

Frank Ritz, 50, gets paid for sitting around all day and watching television—literally. A prizewinning critic, he is surrounded by top-drawer media-consumer technology, his study a vision of "winking red and green lights...digitized all-knowingness, like the cabin of a jumbo jet." The trouble is, his wife is firmly committed to the homespun life—anything to oppose Frank, it seems. Melissa writes what he calls "feministical-erotic novels" longhand; when she's not doing so, she snipes at him for his choice of profession, even though, Frank fumes, "without his watching that crap all day she couldn't afford the luxury of writing a hundred words a month." Frank finds himself thrust outside the door, shed of his cocoon. And what's a poor boy to do without his TV? Why, start chasing women of every description. "What a mystery girls were," Frank ponders. "You just never knew what you were going to find. No wonder there were some men who never stopped." Frank is relentless in his non-stopping, embarking on a sexual odyssey to do Molly Bloom proud, even as Jacobson fills in the background with sad and sordid tales of early misadventures with Scandinavian exchange students and flower children. The arrangements get a little complex at times, including one particularly odd and acrobatic threesome toward the end of the tale, eventually leading Frank more or less full circle. Will he find happiness? We can never quite be sure, but Frank is exuberant in his midlife freedom. Jacobson's writing perfectly matches that mood, exemplified by a long passage, the literary equivalent of a filmic single-tracking shot, describing a walk along Oxford Street, "eyeballing policemen, postmen, traffic wardens, bus drivers, cab drivers, van drivers, street-sweepers," and on and on, embracing the whole of humanity.

A lovely, lively novel for all its sometimes bitter view of the war between the sexes; impeccably written, and without a false note.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

September 15, 2011

Frank Ritz is an acerbic British television critic facing a midlife crisis. He is also a sex addict who feels compelled to cruise around the dreary back streets of a provincial city looking for even drearier encounters with local hookers. He's finally thrown out of the house by his longtime lover, Melissa (Mel), a bulimic writer of "feministic-erotic" novels who can match Frank in the self-loathing department. Jacobson is a talented writer who can carry off almost Joycean wordplay. He is especially funny when mocking British TV. But Frank's many sexual escapades grow tiresome after a while, though he finds redemption of sorts toward the end. VERDICT Originally published in Britain in 1998 and just released here, presumably because Jacobson won the Man Booker Prize last year for The Finkler Question, this sometimes witty and often raunchy novel will most likely appeal to fairly sophisticated male readers familiar with British life.--Leslie Patterson, Rehoboth, MA

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 1, 2011
Ever since he first heard a bawdy term for female genitalia in the schoolyard, when he was six, Frank Ritz has been obsessed with sex. He explored it liberally in his youth and adulthood, but now that he's 50, his own genitalia no longer drive him as they once did. But when Ritz, the best TV criticor at least, one of the bestin Britain, is thrown out of the house by his bulimic wife, soft- and hard-core porn romance novelist Mel, he reviews his priapic past, which includes unbridled fornication at Oxford, a rendezvous in Paris with his best friend's wife, and a threesome with Mel and Clarice from Little Cleverly. Now seeking tranquility, he takes up residence in a monastery until, after months away from home, he hears from Mel. First published in England in 1998, this novel, with its abundance of crude sex terms, offers a raw view of the sexes and the differences between them and lacks the gentle humor of Jacobson's Man Booker Prize winner, The Finkler Question (2010).(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)