Zoo time

Guy Ableman is a novelist who cannot get free of his wife, Vanessa, a strikingly beautiful red-head who is contrary, highly strung and always close to blazing anger. He is just as captivated by her alluring mother, Poppy. The two women are more like sisters than mother and daughter, and they arrive as a pair. Their presence wrecks his peace of mind and stirs up the wildest story ideas, yet leaves him unable to concentrate long enough to write any of them.

Guy's professional world is no happier. Hardly anyone reads his books, and hardly anyone is reading anything at all. He fears that reading itself is finished. His publisher, sharing that fear, has killed himself, and his agent, like all agents, has gone into hiding. Meanwhile Vanessa has started writing a novel of her own. Guy doubts she will finish it, or even begin it, but he dreads what will follow if she does.

Escaping both personal disappointment and a more general despair, Guy begins to wonder whether it is time to take his feelings for Poppy further. Fiction may be dying, but desire is not, and he imagines that desire might yield one last great book. Howard Jacobson's novel is angry, elegiac and rude by turns, and its subject is love: of women, of literature and of laughter.