… to nonagenarian love

Towards the end of Live a Little, one of its two main characters says: ‘I’m past the age of waiting for something to go wrong. It already has.’ And we know what has, because some 200 pages earlier we have seen the man as a young boy, just before the second world war, pulling his mother’s underwear out of the laundry basket. Here is how the moment, and its repercussions, are described: ‘He climbed into his mother’s bloomers and tumbled into hell.’

Let’s pause to consider the comic elegance and precision of that sentence. I think it’s fair to say that only Howard Jacobson could have written it, and not just because of the subject matter (I can’t help feeling that he’s not the first Jacobson character to have done this; there is at least a sense of inevitability that one of them, one day, would). Just look at the way he makes the English language dance for us, those Ls, those Bs, those BLs. And let’s especially salute that use of the word ‘bloomers’, which, as the other chief character observes, would be incomprehensible to anyone younger than them.

Which would be almost everyone. Shimi Carmelli and Beryl Dusinbery, two people whom we know are destined to meet, but don’t until more than half the novel has passed, are in their tenth decades. It is a tricky subject, that of nonagenarian love: I’ll never forget Beckett’s Malone trying to insert his sex into a woman’s like someone trying to stuff a pillow into a pillowcase. What’s remarkable is the tact that Jacobson uses. ‘Age is not a comedy,’ says Mrs Dusinbery (she’s fictional, I know, but I’m not going to tempt her outrage by calling her ‘Beryl’).