FICTION/The Making of Henry: 'Can a mother run out of interest in her child?" Henry Nagel, the sixty-something central figure in Howard Jacobson's The Making of Henry, suspects his own mother did.
He suspects his father had a long-term mistress; he suspects that he is incapable of finding love; he suspects that the woman who appears to love him will, inevitably, leave him; he suspects that the man in the apartment next door is trying to woo her. Henry Nagel's life is an unfulfilled suspicion.
Born to a mother who burned everything she cooked and a father who worked as a fire-eater and magician, Henry looks back on "pyromaniacal parents who lay waste to everything" and cannot help but conclude that they have laid waste to his life, too.
But it isn't just his parents who are the problem. Friends "stay away from him whatever he decides". Colleagues make him feel "how well acquainted everybody but Henry is with everybody else". And, now, he is threatened by the behaviour of his neighbour, Lachlan Louis Stevenson. He is haunted by the memory of his sexual passion for his great-aunt Marghanita. He talks constantly to his father's ghost. He envies his lost school friend Osmond Belkin. He revisits the affairs he had with other men's wives. His life and home are so full of lost opportunities and thwarted possibilities that there is hardly room in it for Moira, the woman who might love him.
He marvels at "the infinitesimal raising of her behind, like a deer at a waterhole" but is unsure if this is an erotic feeling, it may simply, he decides, be "a pictorial curiosity". Suffering, like jealousy, is close to his heart.
The challenge facing Howard Jacobson is to take a man whose life is simple yet complicated, and often irritating, and make him interesting. There is a point in The Making of Henry where the book, like its central character, reaches a mid-life crisis but Jacobson, the storyteller, takes his readers through that critical patch, more or less intact.
Where Jacobson is at his best is in the passages where feelings, or the absence of feelings, in Henry's case, are given their head. The conversations between Henry and his dead father; the little intimacies that are part of Moira and Henry's love affair; the observations that Jacobson scatters, like blazing dandelions in a fussy garden, all lead towards a bitter, heartbreaking and beautiful conclusion. A small act of kindness, the carrying of a dead dog to its owner's home, becomes a moment of redemption.
"He bends to scoop up Angus, that thing of piss and shit and undiscriminating love, and carries him half the length of the High Street. Henry's first corpse. Done it. Done it at last. Not heavy as he'd expected. Not the cold dead weight he'd always feared. So warm and soft, in fact, that for a moment he believes the dog is not dead at all, that he can feel the bruised heart trying to beat again."
In this one real and metaphorical moment, Jacobson draws together all the bitternesses of life's disappointments and disillusions and replaces them with optimism as Henry realises that the heartbeat he feels "is only his own pulse, quickening the dog's pelt".
It is in the hope of such moments of salvation that we live.
John MacKenna is a novelist, biographer and short-story writer. He is currently working on a collection of short stories
The Making of Henry By Howard Jacobson Jonathan Cape, 340 pp. £12.99