The Finkler Question

As a general rule, I finish books that I start.

Can you tell that this book is going to be an exception?

I pulled this book off the Kindle bestseller list. It won the Man Booker prize. According to Amazon, it is a "wry, devastating novel"; it is also a "scorching story of friendship and loss, exclusion and belonging, and of the wisdom and humanity of maturity." The Guardian calls it a "dazzling novel".

Maybe they finished the book. I can't convince myself that I should.

Admittedly, the prose is limpid. And it is darkly and determinedly lugubrious. Unfortunately, the combination of those two features results in a text that I can only describe as flaccid and, having discovered the perfect appropriateness of that word, I am left without motivation or ability to reopen my Kindle copy of this book.

Jacobson's prose really is incredible and beautiful. He fills his pages with evocative descriptions. The protagonist's wingmen "were somehow warmed by their submersion in a heated past." His women, "resembled one another a bit, soliciting his pity by their neurasthenic paleness..." But the high-strung phrases fail to rescue the dithering obsession with a weak personality drowning in a drone of sorrows and perpetual confusion. I find myself somewhat sad that this weak "Finklerism" represents the euphemism for "the Jewish question," especially after the power of Potock and Bashevis Singer.

So I'm finished with the book. I struggled through page after electronic page of limpid, flaccid sorrow bracketed by phrase jewels, and my time is more important than finishing the book. So is avoiding insanity. If you really disagree, please tell me. Maybe the book improves after Treslove finally reveals the true Jewish question to his wingmen. Or after his women commiserate over the operatic names of his bastard sons. But I'm exhausted, and finished.