Pussy

Howard Jacobson

Jonathan Cape, £12.99

Review by Rosemary Goring

TO SATIRISE Donald Trump’s rise to power is an unenviable task, yet perhaps Howard Jacobson felt he could not avoid it. Each banal or venal, meaningless, contradictory or pugnacious utterance, each step upwards on the unstoppable elevator to the most influential job in the world has issued a direct challenge to anyone who calls themselves a comic novelist.

And yet, how can humour gild the real thing which, as has so often been said, is almost beyond parody?

Jacobson’s Pussy opens with the Book of Revelations, in which a beast rises up out of the sea, “and they worshipped the beast...and there was given unto him a mouth speaking foolish things”. Only the first of the many problems with this novel, however, is that there is nothing revelatory about it. Those who keep abreast of the news have a pretty good idea of what kind of man Trump is, and what – who – brought him to power. And why.

Jacobson, like so many other western liberals, nevertheless beats against the bars of his educated, subtle, witty and well-informed mind, like a moth against a sizzling lightbulb, as he struggles to comprehend the makings of such a mesmerisingly alarming creature.

Since it is too early for realist fiction about a global figure who manages to be both larger and smaller than life, Pussy is told as a fairy-tale or fable. It is set in the walled Republic of Urbs-Ludus, a toytown state described by its ruler, the Grand Duke of Origen, as “a benign commercial plutocracy of play”. He tells his son Fracassus, Trump’s fictional counterpart, that such a place “cannot be run on democratic lines, but where the people’s wants don’t run counter to our own, we indulge them.”

Among the many reflections offered in these pages is that the electorate doesn’t know what is in its best interests, and favours those who offer the illusion of what it thinks it wants. Nor does a figurehead have to be squeaky clean. Readers are offered many inversions of what once passed for wisdom, such as: “If they know you to be a liar through and through, and you show that you know they know you to be a liar, they can trust you....”

The small-eyed, tiny-fisted, yellow-haired son of the Grand Duke arrived as an infant in the golden palace as one already anointed. “Fracassus came griping into the world in expectation of every blessing that a fond father, a copper-bottomed construction empire, a fiscal system sympathetic to the principle of play, and an age grown weary of making informed judgements could lavish, short, that is, of a sweet nature, a generous disposition, an ability to accept criticism, a sense of the ridiculous, quick apprehension, and a way with words.”

Already Jacobson seems to be toiling, and the baby has yet to be weaned. There is little to make one smile in this heavy-handed description, and as with later ludicrous scenarios, it reduces the novelist to what feels like sneering, rather than exalted wit. The original who inspired the idea of Fracassus is an extreme version of narcissistic human nature. It is impossible to over-egg him, without tipping over into farce. For a writer such as Jacobson, this subject is simply too crude for his talents, and the effort in trying to concoct a plot around his grotesque protagonist’s march on the throne feels both contrived and laboured.

For certain readers, nevertheless, it might offer some balm. To see the world through Fracassus’s eyes could be illuminating, or at least consoling. To watch as he learns how to put words together – he makes late developers look smarter than Stephen Hawking – and finds in Twitter the perfect medium for his butterfly thoughts is to observe the dreadful outcome of a society getting the leader it deserves. In this novel, the idea that Trump is Frankenstein’s monster, and we have only ourselves to blame – or the uneducated rednecks who voted for him – reaches its apotheosis.

And that, indeed, is the real and least funny message in Pussy. Fracassus only became great because he was born into an age in which his remarkable absence of quality or integrity could be interpreted as exactly what the world needed. Or, as those around him reflect, in such times as these “the last person for the job would easily turn out to the first person for the job”.

There are many convolutions in this bildungsroman, from childhood to coronation, each offering a nod to Trump’s own CV, be it his love of building towers, hosting tasteless reality TV, his bromance with Vladimir Putin, or his predatory attitude to women. So close to real life does it stick, in fact, that any pleasure a fairy story might offer is lost beneath the game of catching all the references and the walk-on parts for unfortunates such as Hillary Clinton, who fall beneath the wunderkind’s wheels.

You could argue that what is happening in America, and in other triumphs of reactionary popular politics is too serious for comedy, but that would be wrong. In the right hands even the Third Reich could be mined for mockery. So it is not that Trump is not ripe for being laughed at, nor that what his election presages is too ghastly to turn into a joke. Perhaps, as Pussy demonstrates, the heart of the problem is not that someone as ghastly as Fracassus can speak to the disenfranchised or bigoted, the neglected or downtrodden. It is that the liberals who would defend the principle of democracy to their dying breath cannot cope when it produces a result they find abhorrent. That, surely, is where the real comedy lies.