Review

Winkler

By Giles Coren

Published by Vintage

What is it that makes us humble readers cling to the shirt-tails of despicable fictional characters as they belch and squelch their way through life?

Martin Amis has put us through it (lots of times), Andrew Martin did it (with Bilton) and now, in Winkler, Giles Coren has served up as foul and unlikeable character as the literary world has seen for some time.

From his grotty flat, which he shares with his Irish girlfriend Mary and another couple, Winkler schleps to his place of unspecified work every morning. He despises everyone in the building and everyone he comes into contact with on his way there, from other underground passengers to the mechanics at the Saab garage. He is terrified of being pushed under the wheels of a tube train while simultaneoulsy fantasising about doing exactly the same thing to others. And he thinks about sex – a lot.

In short, Winkler lives a rubbish life in which his only real personal ties are to the sweaty and mouthy Mary, and his grandfather, whom he consistently fails to visit.

There are, however, reasons for Winkler’s despondency, and they are all tied up with his past, his parents (or, rather, lack of) and the legacy of his Jewish ancestry. Following a chance encounter with a blind girl in which he … actually, I’ll leave you to find out this bit …, events in Winkler’s life begin to take on a momentum of their own and he soon finds himself spiralling out of control and into big trouble.

Coren’s debut novel is a locomotive of roaring energy which hurls words and bodily fluids in every direction; it is a concoction of spluttering, queasy bile and greasy scatological verve. The Jewish comic novel has a rich pedigree in Britain (think Howard Jacobson) and the United States (Philip Roth, Alan Isler) but Coren has done the home team proud by attaching a turbo engine to his writing and flooring the pedal.

Other Jewish fiction

David Bezmozgis Natasha and Other Stories (Cape) – debut collection of short stories set in Canada; winner of the 2005 Jewish Quarterly Wingate Prize for Fiction

Gary Shteyngart The Russian Debutante’s Handbook (Bloomsbury) – the madcap adventures of Vladimir Girshkin, 25-year-old Russian-Jewish immigrant, employee of the Emma Lazarus Immigrant Absorption Agency in New York.

Howard Jacobson The Making of Henry (Vintage) – after sixty years of disappointment, Henry inherits a big house and falls in love.

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