The Finkler Question

Julian Treslove has never quite managed a career, a marriage, or a settled sense of himself, and works as a professional lookalike for celebrities he does not resemble. His oldest friend is Sam Finkler, a popular philosopher and television personality, and both were taught by Libor Sevcik, a Czech émigré and former Hollywood gossip columnist. Finkler and Libor are both recently widowed. Treslove, walking home from dinner with them, is mugged by a woman who says something he half hears and interprets as an accusation about being Jewish, and this becomes the hinge of the book: a Gentile who begins to want, with escalating absurdity, to be Jewish, while Finkler joins a group of ashamed Jews campaigning against Israel and Libor mourns his wife and watches antisemitism reappear in a London he thought had finished with it. Jacobson writes it as a comedy, and it is genuinely and continuously funny, but the laughter runs alongside real grief and a serious argument about identity, appropriation and what it means to claim a history that is not yours. The Booker had rarely gone to an avowedly comic novel, and this one earned it.