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The concept of collective guilt is a familiar one — the sins of the father being passed on to the son — as is that of collective responsibility, although perhaps more in the evasion than the acceptance. In Kalooki Nights, Howard Jacobson introduces us to a form of collective anger, specifically the Jewish response to the Holocaust, whether or not one was a victim, or even a direct witness. More generally, Jacobson’s latest novel, narrating the life of Max Glichman, a cartoonist from a non-observing Jewish family in north Manchester, is a meditation on Judaism, and Judeophobia, in a vast array of manifestations.

“Meditation”, however, is too placid a word to describe the ferocity of Max’s engagement with — obsession with — his subject. Although there are plenty of comic touches from the beginning in Jacobson’s portrayal of Max’s family, ruled by a benignly dictatorial and fiercely secular father and a glamorous mother whose life is given over to the card game of the novel’s title, the darker themes are not introduced slowly, or as a contrast to an established picture of domesticity. They are in full force from the beginning, or the second page at least: “And for this, an uncle of mine used to say, apropos anything Jewish, the Nazis tried to exterminate us.” That remark, Max’s father’s exasperated response (“Since when did any Nazi try to exterminate you, Ike? You personally?”) and Max’s reflection upon them (“I inferred that no, my father and my uncle could not have been playing, but must have intended their jousting as a sort of magic, to ward off evil. To keep us from being got rid of, driven out, and the rest of it”) establish straight away the tone, theme and even the rhythm of the novel, a sort of three-step in which arguments are recounted, countered and then commented upon.

Max’s father, we learn, had been a boxer, whose career was cut short by a propensity to bleed from the nose (Jacobson, as always, is alive to the anti-semitic ironic mileage to be made from a Jew and his nose, and beats the bigots to it). In many ways, the book resembles a boxing match, with the arguments duking it out, barely observing Marquess of Queensberry rules, before Max/Jacobson (there sometimes seems little distinction) steps in, referee-like.

Max’s secular, integrationist family is mirrored by his contemporary Manny Washinsky’s orthodox household. As far as the Glichmans are concerned, if the Washinskys “were not living in the Middle Ages . . . to us they were the halfway house on the journey back”. It is Manny (awkward, obsessive, “never a teenager”) who introduces Max to the complexities of Jewish faith and observance, and to the horrors of the Holocaust. But it is Manny, too, whose pathological response to a rupture in his family leads to his committing murder. The uncovering of the story behind that crime (courtesy of a television production company that approaches Max to contact his childhood friend on Manny’s release to do a “treatment”) provides the ostensible impetus for our protagonist’s raking over his collective past.

Max’s own life is documented in the interstices of the worrying away at the problem of Manny, Jewishness and anti-semitism. The evocations of Max’s failed marriages are in Jacobson’s characteristic borderline miso- gynist mode, with the caricatured “Cruellas” taking the form of two almost interchangeable Judeophobic “shiksehs”, and one orthodox “self-hating Jew” who substitutes guilt for hatred as a weapon of marital destruction. They all have diaereses on their names (Zoë, Chloë), as if to make it clear that they are really ciphers, not credible characters.

Kalooki Nights is a book to laugh at, learn from and argue with, but despite the profusion of characters and an overarching mystery — why Manny killed his parents — it seems something less as well as more than a novel. Partly, this is down to the repetition that Jacobson indulges in: the themes of separation, identity, punishment, guilt and responsibility are worried over again and again, often in similar phrases. But partly it is because Jacobson seems less interested in portraying convincing human beings when there’s a good intellectual scrap to be had. Kalooki Nights is a novel of ideas in which the second part of the description counts for twice as much as the first.

David Horspool is an editor at the Times Literary Supplement. Kalooki Nights is available at the Books First price of £16.19 (including p&p) on 0870 165 8585

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