Zoo Time

Howard Jacobson has many axes to grind in this, his latest since winning the Man Booker Prize in 2010. He wants to talk about digital publishing, the internet, traditional publishing, cowardly agents, readers, the death of everything that is sacred and holy about books and why he hates book groups. Zoo Time reads like a thinly-disguised state of Jacobson’s mind.

 

But like all Howard Jacobson books, it’s all so very funny.

 

Guy Ableman, in love with his wife and in lust with her mother, is in crisis. No one is reading anymore. His editor has just killed himself. Everyone is getting stupider. And he has to talk to endless book groups. He waltzes from disaster to disaster causing chaos, railing against the ills of the world and living a life of vice and abandon. Whilst working out his various crises. What Jacobson throws away in conventional plot, he makes up for in abundance with witticisms, barbs, rants and some of his funniest dialogue yet. A delight from start to finish.