A life in writing: Howard Jacobson
'If you're going to be a great comic writer, not a humorist, you've got to take it into the throat of grief
Lindesay Irvine , The Guardian, Saturday 7 August 2010 

Jacobson talks to Lindesay Irvine about ignoring awards, getting compared to Philip Roth, and the blood and guts at the heart of great comic writing 

Howard Jacobson in his loft in Soho. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe

Howard Jacobson claims not to be bothered about awards. "You just take no notice of them, really," he says, not entirely convincingly. "It's always nice to be praised, and insofar as a prize is a form of praise, you're glad when you get it." His intense, cerebral comedies, which gnaw away at his Anglo-Jewish identity, the convolutions of the male mind and the battle of the sexes, have won him extravagant praise over the years. But this esteem has yet to be fully cashed in at award ceremonies – though his new novel, The Finkler Question, about two old friends, one recently widowed, is a prominent contender on the Booker Prize longlist.
One obstacle to winning awards has perhaps been that his talents are predominantly comic – he admits to being irritated by the lack of respect for comedy among the literary establishment. "The novel began as a comic form," he says with some exasperation. "You've got Cervantes and Rabelais and they are wild. And while you can't really say you want every novel to be comic thereafter, I kind of do, really. And if I don't get it I feel a little cheated."
He cites George Eliot as a kind of backwards proof that novels lose their way without comedy, having recently been looking at his old copy of Middlemarch. "It's wonderful, but you feel embarrassed for her when she tries to be funny; she's elephantine. But it fascinates me that she knows she should be trying to be funny, and that she knows the novel is not complete without comedy. It's absurd the value that's placed on literature as a religiose form, when the novel is an anti-religiose form. It's scornful, spiteful, tough. Which is exactly what makes it sacred."
Embracing his own gifts as a comic writer took Jacobson a good long time. He was born in 1942 in Manchester, "with the bombs dropping around me . . . There's a sort of feeling that this has affected me in some way, a certain turbulence in my character," in a neighbourhood that "was half-Jewish and half-not. There would have been synagogues not far off but it was by no means a ghetto."
It's a childhood he remembers with fondness. "It was entirely non-religious in a way I really liked and still like and miss because Jews have become more religious again. There was a feeling of 'we're Jewish, and we know we're Jewish and on important days we go to the synagogue and the boys will have a barmitzvah, and we would like you to marry in, if you wouldn't mind.'"

Read the full interview at The Guardian.