Zoo Time By Howard Jacobson

In Brief

Winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize 2013 for comic fiction, the new novel from the author of the Booker prize- winning The Finkler Question

In Detail

Novelist Guy Ableman is in thrall to his vivacious wife Vanessa, a strikingly beautiful red-head, contrary, highly strung and blazingly angry. The trouble is, he is no less in thrall to her alluring mother, Poppy. More like sisters than mother and daughter, they come as a pair, a blistering presence that destroys Guy's peace of mind, suggesting the wildest stories but making it impossible for him to concentrate long enough to write any of them.

Not that anyone reads Guy, anyway. Not that anyone is reading anything. Reading, Guy fears, is finished. His publisher, fearing the same, has committed suicide. His agent, like all agents, is in hiding. Vanessa, in the meantime, is writing a novel of her own. Guy doesn't expect her to finish it, or even start it, but he dreads the consequences if she does.

In flight from personal disappointment and universal despair, Guy wonders if it's time to take his love for Poppy to another level. Fiction might be dead, but desire isn't. And out of that desire he imagines squeezing one more great book.

By turns angry, elegiac and rude, Zoo Time is a novel about love - love of women, love of literature, love of laughter. It shows our funniest writer at his brilliant best.

About the Author

An award-winning writer and broadcaster, Howard Jacobson was born in Manchester, brought up in Prestwich and was educated at Stand Grammar School in Whitefield, and Downing College, Cambridge, where he studied under F. R. Leavis. He lectured for three years at the University of Sydney before returning to teach at Selwyn College, Cambridge. His novels include The Mighty Walzer (winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize), Kalooki Nights (longlisted for the Man Booker Prize), the highly acclaimed The Act of Love, the 2010 Man Booker Prize-winning, The Finkler Question and, most recently, Zoo Time. Howard Jacobson lives in Soho, London.

Questions for Discussion

1) ‘He says he didn’t intend to put himself in his novels, and always despised authors who did, but he admits it seems to have ended up that way’ – Lynn Barber, The Sunday Times.

‘She had no feeling for fiction [Mishnah Grunewald]. Who does anymore? She took the ‘I’ in the novel for her and therefore supposed that every thought expressed was intended to be hers.’ – Chapter 3, p.21

How important is our comprehension of the ‘author figure’ in understanding Zoo Time? Discuss in what ways the theme of ‘authorship’ is addressed in the book.

2) ‘‘‘The Mother-in-Law Joke’’ wasn’t going well. I didn’t like my hero Little Gid … He wasn’t the cause of my constipation, he was my constipation. A hero I had to squeeze out of me but who remained resolutely locked inside. What did it say about me? Was I locked inside myself?’ – Chapter 22, p.188

‘It was fiction, told through the false prism of truth.’ – Chapter 30, p.245

‘Jacobson’s characters are hard to be around. But this slow and bitter build-up culminates in the final quarter of Zoo Time, where everything speeds up, everybody’s life is changed and a kind of redemption is achieved.’ – Alexei Sayle, The Telegraph

With your discussion of Question 1 in mind, discuss how far you think the character of Guy Ableman achieves clarity & resolution through his distortion of truth & fact in his novels. How aware are we that, as a novelist, his tendency to distort the truth affects his first-person narration of events?

3) It was a journey back to more than a previous place, it was a journey back to a previous person. I felt reclaimed, as though Wilmslow knew my secrets and had the power to keep me or let me go.’ –Chapter 24, p.196

How are Landscape, environment and setting used within the prose? Do the characters react differently, or behave differently in the various settings of the book? Did you find it odd that characters always suited or matched their environments? Think about Merton & Elmwyn, and Guy, Vanessa and Poppy’s reactions to Australia, Wilmslow and London.

4) ‘Some time later… I don’t think I need to be specific. Start counting years and all you are measuring is loss. Time passes – let’s leave it at that. Mankind cannot bear too much specify.’ – Chapter 36, p.295

Specific ‘time-frames’ (e.g. ‘Broome 3 years ago’ – Chapter 29, p.238) are rarely given to us in the novel. Time is, more often than not, treated with disregard (‘a month or so later…’ – chapter 30, p.241) and the chronology of the book is sometimes disjointed, often jumping in time frame and location between chapters. How does this affect our reading of the novel?

5) The singular, isolated use of ‘Time Passes’ in the main quote of Question 4 seems like an overt reference to Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse (in which the second of three parts is titled Time Passes). On the dedication page of Zoo Time there is a quote from James Joyce’s Ulysses, another quintessentially modernist text. Considering these references to modernist writers, how could Zoo Time read as a modernist text? As well as the treatment of time, are there other features of the novel that emulate the modernist style? Did you spot any further references to modernist authors in the text?

6) ‘I’m absolutely consumed with fear of death. A lot of my friends have died over the last four or five years. I live in dread of it.’ – Jacobson, speaking to Lynn Barber, The Sunday Times. ‘Metaphorically speaking, at least, we all had pistols in our filing cabinets. Even those publishers who still had writers, even those writers who still had readers, knew the game was up.’ – Chapter 4, p.24

What does the novel have to say about the decline of ‘traditional practices’ & formats in the publishing industry? Think about characters like Merton, Francis, Guy, the ‘distinguished elderly novelist’ (p.158) at the literary festival and Sandy Ferber. Is Zoo Time wholly negative in its appraisal of the emerging, technology-based marketplace for books? In what other ways is the book preoccupied with the themes of death, decay and decline?

7) Is the publishing industry and, in a more general sense, the literary world to which Guy Ableman belongs, depicted as having equal opportunities for men and women? Does the novel present a marginalised view of either sex? Some characters to think about could be Flora McBeth, Francis, Vanessa, Guy, Philippa, Mishnah Grunewald, the Querreys, Sally Comfort, BoBo De Souza (‘Oh, I’m OK…or I will be if you let me borrow your moustache ’ – p.194, Chapter 23).

8) ‘[It’s] the funniest novel I’ve ever written’ – Jacobson, speaking to Lynn Barber, The Sunday Times.

‘[a] seriously funny book.’ – Alexei Sayle, The Telegraph

‘Less focussed and reflective than The Finkler Question, Zoo Time is considerably funnier.’ – David Grylls, The Sunday Times Magazine

How funny did you find the novel? What features of Jacobson’s writing style make you laugh hardest? Did, however, you find the book depressing in instances? Does this add to the humour of the novel and do you think this is his funniest work?

9) …My father had asked me if I fancied joining him in a spit roast of my mother. My mother had understood what he meant – which alarmed me – and was only fractionally annoyed… All right, he was senile. But we go senile in a way that reflects our natures. I’d always wondered who my father was. Now I knew. He was a sleazebag…We were sons of a whoremonger, Jeffery Tumour and I. Maybe of a whore as well. We were children of the damned. – Chapter 25, p.217

How do you feel about the representation of ‘family’ in the novel? Is it wholly perverse? You could talk about Guy’s parents, Jeffery, Poppy & Vanessa’s relationship and Guy & Vanessa’s marriage.

10) What did you make of the novel’s enigmatic ending? What did the image represent for you? What could it mean and how does this relate to the novels principle concerns?