The Making of Henry

The Reviewing of Howard

In one of the episodes in which Henry Nagel contemplates death -- there are many -- he considers the phrase, "To know him was to be embarrassed for him" for his own tombstone. The Henry of Howard Jacobson's The Making of Henry is such a character, unique yet somehow familiar. On the cusp of sixty and chafing at the modern world, he carries on conversations with his dead father, wonders about a successful childhood friend, and obsesses over his own demise. Coddled by his mother and her sisters as a boy, he is unable to have relationships with women as an adult, except women who are married, and preferably older than he. Like any neurotic, he is full of shame and afraid of feeling. Dismissed from the backward university where he has spent his entire working life, essentially because he cannot cope with post-feminism academia, his life would seem to be over. But then he gets a second act: He mysteriously inherits a London apartment, where his father may or may not have once kept a mistress. Henry meets and soon falls in love with his regular waitress, a quirky, bawdy divorcee. Of course, Henry will have to give up some of his neurosis if he is to have a happy ending. Plot-wise, The Making of Henry is a simple girl-saves-boy story. But along the way, Jacobson reveals Henry's life story with a hysterical, pathos-rich energy. Jacobson can be sweet, but he can also be very, very funny, and that makes his exhaustive catalog of what could so easily have been a curmudgeonly type well worth the read.

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