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Exit the love wounds
By Tom Barbash |
May 17, 2009, Sunday
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Print Edition
FELIX Quinn, the subversively romantic narrator of Howard Jacobson's twisted and acrobatically impressive new novel, "The Act of Love" believes "only the sick are healthy." Felix is a rare breed of protagonist, a willful and discerning cuckold. Far from fearing his wife's infidelity, he arranges its continued occurrence and even selects her lover. He wants his wife, Marisa, to sleep not just with someone else but with a legitimate Lothario, "a man who would cross any boundary if there was gloomy mischief in it." After much searching, he manages to find such a person - a handsome layabout named Marius, encountered at a funeral.
Jacobson's previous novel, "Kalooki Nights," was told in the voice of a Jewish cartoonist attempting to untangle a friend's Holocaust-inspired crime. In "The Act of Love," Jacobson explores sexual obsession and secret manipulation. The owner of an antiquarian bookstore, a connoisseur of art and music, Felix proclaims that his specialty is "sexual insult," which he seeks and finds everywhere, eventually subjecting Marisa to multiple viewings of plays about betrayal. Of particular interest is "Othello," whose title character, in Felix's view, longs for Desdemona to "be enjoyed" by others.
Felix charts his life through exceptional instances of heartache, beginning with an early girlfriend who fell for another boy while Felix was holding her hand at the movies. In the aftermath, he burnished his disappointment "until there was no skin left between my heart and me." When he was 16, an associate of his father, afflicted by the same disease, encouraged Felix to seduce his beautiful (and dying) wife. After Felix declined, the husband directed him to a passage in Herodotus in which King Candaules, "disordered" by love, arranges for another man to spy on his wife's nakedness.
Jacobson goes to great comedic lengths to detail Felix's love for his wife, including soaring tributes to her breasts and dancing style and general beauty, from which he "had to look away. It was either that or go blind." The book is also stocked with aphorisms about marriage and attraction, deviancy and love. For Felix, jealousy and love are so closely intertwined he can't tell them apart. Above all, he fears the loss of jealousy; he's as protective of it as a doting father might be of a favorite child.
Since Jacobson's protagonist is a man who lives inside his head, "The Act of Love" is both gorgeously and monstrously internal. To read it is to take a trip with someone so lucidly demented that you lose your bearings. Which isn't to say he's wrong about his own motivations. The more you love a woman, Felix insists, the more you fear her loss. And so, he asks, "is it not a sensible strategy - of the imagination and the heart - to practice losing her?"
Jacobson's previous novel, "Kalooki Nights," was told in the voice of a Jewish cartoonist attempting to untangle a friend's Holocaust-inspired crime. In "The Act of Love," Jacobson explores sexual obsession and secret manipulation. The owner of an antiquarian bookstore, a connoisseur of art and music, Felix proclaims that his specialty is "sexual insult," which he seeks and finds everywhere, eventually subjecting Marisa to multiple viewings of plays about betrayal. Of particular interest is "Othello," whose title character, in Felix's view, longs for Desdemona to "be enjoyed" by others.
Felix charts his life through exceptional instances of heartache, beginning with an early girlfriend who fell for another boy while Felix was holding her hand at the movies. In the aftermath, he burnished his disappointment "until there was no skin left between my heart and me." When he was 16, an associate of his father, afflicted by the same disease, encouraged Felix to seduce his beautiful (and dying) wife. After Felix declined, the husband directed him to a passage in Herodotus in which King Candaules, "disordered" by love, arranges for another man to spy on his wife's nakedness.
Jacobson goes to great comedic lengths to detail Felix's love for his wife, including soaring tributes to her breasts and dancing style and general beauty, from which he "had to look away. It was either that or go blind." The book is also stocked with aphorisms about marriage and attraction, deviancy and love. For Felix, jealousy and love are so closely intertwined he can't tell them apart. Above all, he fears the loss of jealousy; he's as protective of it as a doting father might be of a favorite child.
Since Jacobson's protagonist is a man who lives inside his head, "The Act of Love" is both gorgeously and monstrously internal. To read it is to take a trip with someone so lucidly demented that you lose your bearings. Which isn't to say he's wrong about his own motivations. The more you love a woman, Felix insists, the more you fear her loss. And so, he asks, "is it not a sensible strategy - of the imagination and the heart - to practice losing her?"
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