The Act of Love Read online

  Praise for The Act of Love

  “[A] fascinating sneak into love’s darkest alleys … Jacobson’s beautiful, rhythmic writing promises a kind of dank eroticism … Enormously funny … A gem of technical sophistication … To Jacobson, love is … complicated, funny, cruel, sick and always worth one’s while. Much like this wickedly terrific book.”

  —The Globe and Mail

  “Twisted and acrobatically impressive … 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.”

  —The New York Times

  “It is an almost frighteningly brilliant achievement. Why did the Booker judges not recognise it?”

  —The Guardian

  “The dialogue … crackles like a wood fire. Jacobson’s unique prose style combines the Augustan balance of 18th-century Enlightenment writing with Nabokovian conceit and elegant modern aphorisms … The Act of Love is a startling achievement: shocking, argumentative, funny, rude, querulous, intellectually bracing.”

  —The Independent

  “One of the author’s most affecting, honest and brilliant works. It is a searingly well written piece by a ridiculously underrated novelist.”

  —The Sunday Telegraph

  “A hell of a book … Intense and powerful, surprisingly funny, totally affecting, and disturbing. It stays with you afterwards, it makes you think differently about men in general and your partner in particular; it makes you reassess the undercurrents of your relationship. It makes you wonder.”

  —Observer Woman

  “Exquisitely written, with sentences that coil slowly to reveal their full nature … There is much wisdom to be found in The Act of Love and Jacobson is a keen, ruthless observer of human behaviour.”

  —Edmonton Journal

  “The Act of Love pushes out boundaries and escorts us—complicit voyeurs, like all consumers of art—into places we would rather not go … With eyes wide open he holds a mirror to the darkest aspects of the soul and suggests that instead of turning away we question our subservience to ancient, savage gods.”

  —The Times

  “Exquisitely shocking and beautifully rendered.”

  —St. Petersburg Times (Tampa Bay, Florida)

  “Entertaining as well as erudite, [The Act of Love] prompts reflections upon art, obsession, masculinity, betrayal and the nature of the erotic … There surely cannot be a more vigorously intelligent novelist than Howard Jacobson writing in this country today.”

  —The Sunday Telegraph

  “A robust novel—preposterous, disturbing and dazzlingly written.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Antiquarian bookseller Felix Quinn is sophisticated, intelligent, and a proper English gentleman in all ways but one: he longs to see his wife, Marisa, in the arms of another man … Jacobson conjures a twisted yet sophisticated love story here, walking a thin line between humor and erotica and often blending the two.”

  —Booklist

  “An impressively sustained, and unusually intense, literary experiment.”

  —Literary Review

  “Jacobson is the closest we in Britain have to Philip Roth … Jacobson injects a kind of molten energy into English that makes it move like another language altogether … Obsession, hidden desires and the salacious thrill of voyeurism all play their part in this brawny tale of love’s flagellant.”

  —Daily Mail (UK)

  “A master of the comedy of social awkwardness … Jacobson is playing a sophisticated literary game, in this most literate of novels.”

  —Esquire

  “Mesmerising … Delightfully funny … [Jacobson] revels in language and in the perverse spell it can cast … The Act of Love is spellbinding, not just in its characterisation, or in its simplicity of plot, in the flirtatiousness with which Jacobson courts language, or the stylish sardonic humour that seems to come so easily, but in its entirety.”

  —The Scotsman

  “A rumbustious account of sexual obsession … Jacobson [is] a witty and ribald chronicler of the human heart.”

  —Tatler

  “It’s great to see a writer hitting his stride like this … Jacobson has done a terrific job. I was trying to work out what had impressed me most—and there’s a lot of great stuff. But I think the best thing is Jacobson’s sheer mental energy—the concentration, the intensity of thought.”

  —The Evening Standard

  “Contains a rich vein of humour … Intelligent and erudite, Felix [the protagonist] is a fascinating character.”

  —Financial Times

  “Naughtily erudite … Jacobson explores the nature of the erotic with a wicked twist … [The protagonist’s] narration is disconcertingly mannered, he’s remarkably honest and blisteringly funny, while Jacobson’s prose is sharp as ever, loaded with spiky dialogue and wonderfully arch observations.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “In the very beginning of this rich and riveting novel, Felix Quinn defines his kind of love … He makes his case well. Bright and beautiful sparks fly off him.”

  —The Boston Globe

  “Jacobson is carving out a niche as the chronicler par excellence of warped, obsessive behavior … Felix’s narrative of love and loss is not only twisted but also witty, and the novel is not only literary but also literate—it’s peppered with writerly allusions from Herodotus to James Joyce, artistic allusions from Fragonard to Lawrence, and musical allusions from Schubert to the tango.”

  —Library Journal

  Praise for Kalooki Nights

  “How is one to convey news of the arrival of a work of genius? This powerful, troubling, moving, profound novel is nothing less … What really steals one’s breath away is its sharpness and depth of insight … and the remorseless tragedy it unfolds, even as it makes one laugh aloud, sometimes in shock … The most intelligent and important novel to appear in this country in years.”

  —The Times (UK)

  “Jacobson is quite simply a master of comic precision. He writes like a dream, with a complete mastery of technique … He can have you in stitches either with a long, beautifully timed paragraph or with a mere two words …”

  —Evening Standard

  “The raging, contentious, hilarious, holy, deicidal, heartbreaking Kalooki Nights is a novel that stands toe-to-toe with the greats.”

  —Sunday Telegraph

  “This is a welcome return to the bittersweet Yiddish-inspired humour at which Jacobson excels, and which has rightly earned him comparisons with Philip Roth … a gloriously pugnacious novel which, not unlike the fiction of Kingsley Amis in his pomp, wants to take on all-comers.”

  —The Guardian

  “The funniest book published this year.”

  —Observer

  “Jacobson’s masterpiece. The writing is flawless, with the author’s trademark blending of tragedy and comedy. A ferocious intelligence courses through it, reminiscent of Philip Roth at his ‘Counterlife’ best.”

  —Jewish Chronicle

  PENGUIN CANADA

  THE ACT OF LOVE

  HOWARD JACOBSON is the author of ten novels, including Kalooki Nights (longlisted for the Man Booker Prize), The Making of Henry, The Mighty Walzer (winner of the 1999 EverymanWodehouse Award for comic writing), Who’s Sorry Now? and several works of non-fiction. He lives in London.

  ALSO BY HOWARD JACOBSON

  Fiction

  Coming from Behind

  Peeping Tom

  Redback

  The Very Model of a Man

  No More Mister Nice Guy

  The Mighty Walzer

  Who’s Sorry Now?

  The Making of Henry

  Kalooki Nights

  No
n-fiction

  Shakespeare’s Magnanimity (with Wilbur Sanders)

  In the Land of Oz

  Roots Schmoots

  Seriously Funny: An Argument for Comedy

  PENGUIN CANADA

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3

  (a division of Pearson Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

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  Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

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  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in Canada by Penguin Group (Canada), a division of Pearson Canada Inc., 2009

  First published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape, Random House, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,

  London SW1V 2SA, 2008

  Published in this edition, 2009

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (WEB)

  Copyright © Howard Jacobson, 2008

  The author is grateful for permission to reprint copyright material from the following: Eroticism by Georges Bataille, translated by Mary Dalwood, reprinted by kind permission of Marion Boyars Publishers. Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire, translated by Jacques LeClercq, reprinted by kind permission of Peter Pauper Press, Inc.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Manufactured in Canada.

  * * *

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Jacobson, Howard

  The act of love / Howard Jacobson.

  ISBN 978-0-14-317065-5

  I. Title.

  PR6060.A265A64 2010 823’.914 C2009-905646-1

  * * *

  Visit the Penguin Group (Canada) website at www.penguin.ca

  Special and corporate bulk purchase rates available; please see

  www.penguin.ca/corporatesales or call 1-800-810-3104, ext. 2477 or 2474

  To Jenny – my one and only

  The fever of the senses is not a desire to die. Nor is love the desire to lose but the desire to live in fear of possible loss, with the beloved holding the lover on the very threshold of a swoon. At that price alone can we feel the violence of rapture before the beloved.

  Georges Bataille, Eroticism

  ‘I’ll tell you . . . what real love is. It is blind devotion, unquestioning self-humiliation, utter submission, trust and belief against yourself and against the whole world, giving up your whole heart and soul to the smiter – as I did!’

  Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

  Prologue

  FOUR O CLOCK SUITED THEM ALL – THE WIFE, THE HUSBAND, THE LOVER.

  Four o’clock: when time in the city quivers on its axis – the day not yet spent, the wheels of evening just beginning to turn.

  The handover hour, was how Marius liked to think of it.

  Marius the cynic. Marius who held that natural selection gave the lie to God, and humanity the lie to natural selection. Marius who anticipated no more big adventures for himself, not even that last adventure left to modern man – ecstatic, immoderate, unseemly, all-consuming love. Marius who took pride in being beyond surprise or disappointment, there being nothing to expect of anybody, least of all himself. Marius the heartbroken.

  He was thirty-five – though he looked and sounded older – tall and hazardously built, with a face suggesting ecological catastrophe: lost city of Atlantis eyes, blasted cheeks, a cruel, dried-up riverbed of a mouth. Women found the look attractive, mistaking their precariousness for his. Me too, though I was in every respect his opposite. I was the ecstatic he thought the world had done with. I am the one whom love consumes.

  We’re all fundamentalists now, regardless of whether we’re believers or we’re atheists. One way or another you have to be devout. Marius worshipped at the altar of Disbelief. I at the altar of Eros. A god’s a god.

  Faith is said to make you strong. My faith was of a different sort. I believed in order to be made weak. Love’s flagellant, in weakness I found my singularity.

  Four o’clock it was, anyway. The handover hour. A conceit so lewd I can barely breathe imagining Marius imagining it.

  As for who was handing over what, that is not a question that can be settled in a sentence, if it can be settled at all. The beauty of an obscene contract is that there’s something in it for everyone.

  The wife, the lover, the husband.

  I was the husband.

  PART ONE

  MARIUS

  Here he is. In his black velvet jacket sumptuously lined with dark fur, he is a proud, handsome despot who plays with the lives and souls of men . . . Under his icy gaze I am again seized with a deadly terror, a premonition that this man will capture and enslave her, that he has the power to subjugate her entirely. Confronted with such fierce virility I feel ashamed and envious.

  Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs

  I FIRST SIGHTED MARIUS, LONG BEFORE I HAD ANY INKLING I’D HAVE USE FOR him – or he for me, come to that – at a country churchyard funeral in Shropshire. One of those heaving-Wrekin mornings the poet Housman made famous – rain streaming on stone and hillock, the gale plying the saplings double, a sunken, sodden, better to be dead than alive in morning. It didn’t matter to me, I was from somewhere else. I could slip on galoshes before I left my hotel, put up an umbrella, endure what had to be endured, and then be gone. But others at the graveside chose to live in this hope-forsaken place. Don’t ask me why. To assist in their own premature interment, is my guess. To be done with life before it could be done with them.

  Such a lust for pain there is out there. Such apocalyptic impatience. I don’t just mean in Shropshire, though Shropshire might have more than its fair share of it, I mean everywhere. Bring on the dirty bomb, we cry, and publish instructions for its manufacture on the Internet. Blow winds and crack your cheeks: we scorch the earth, pitch our tent at the foot of a melting iceberg or disturbed volcano, sunbathe in the path of a tsunami. We can’t wait for it to be over. The masochists we are!

  And all the while we have the wherewithal to suffer exquisitely and still live, if we only knew where to look. In our own beds, for example. In the beloved person lying next to us.

  Love hard enough and you have access to all the pain you’ll ever want.

  Not a thought I articulated at the time, I have to say, not having met, not having married, not having lost my heart and mind to the woman who would be my torturer. Marisa came later. But in the vegetative dark that preceded her, I never doubted that my skin was thinning in prepsaration for someone. Easy to be wise after the event and see Marisa as the fulfilment of all my longings, the one I’d been keeping myself for; but of course I didn’t fall in love only provisionally before I met her. Each time I lost my heart and mind, I b
elieved I had lost them for good. Yet no sooner did I regain my balance than I knew that the woman who would finish me off completely – make me hers as I had never so far been anybody’s, a man possessed in all senses of the word – was still out there, waiting for her consummation as I was waiting for mine. Hence, I suppose, my interest in Marius, before I apprehended the part he would play in that consummation. I must have seen in him the pornographic complement to my as yet incompletely formed desires.

  It was impossible to tell from his demeanour at the funeral whether he was one of the principal mourners. He looked sulkily aggrieved, scarfed up and inky-cloaked like Hamlet, but somehow, though he gave conspicuous support to the widow – a woman I didn’t know, but to whom there clung a sort of shameful consciousness of ancient scandal, like a fallen woman in a Victorian novel – I didn’t think he was the dead man’s son. His distress, assuming it to have been distress, was of a different order. If I had to nail it in a word, I’d say it was begrudging – as though he believed the mourners were weeping for the wrong person. Some men attend a funeral jealously, wishing to appropriate it for themselves, and Marius struck me as such a man.

  I’d known and done a spot of business with the deceased. He had been a professor of literature with a large library. I had travelled up from London to value it. Nothing came of our negotiations. The library was ill-cared for and crumbled into dust before I could come up with a figure. A fortuitous event in its own way, since the professor did not really want to part with his books, whatever their condition. He was a sweet man, out of time and place, who expostulated against life’s cruelties in a squeak, like a mouse. One of life’s, now one of death’s, disappointees. But I hadn’t known him so well that I could move among his family and friends and ask them who the Black Prince was. As for striking up an acquaintance with him directly, that was out of the question. He was as obstinately sealed from eye contact or introduction as the corpse itself.