FICTION: The Act of Love by Howard Jacobson, Jonathan Cape, 308pp. £17.99 'NO MAN HAS ever adored a woman who does not know her to be lying in the arms of someone else." Agree? Disagree? Your answer could substantially influence how much you enjoy Howard Jacobson's new novel, The Act of Love, which largely consists of its narrator Felix's attempts to persuade the reader of the joys of jealousy.
All husbands, Felix maintains, secretly want their wives to be unfaithful to them, and, suitably employed as he is in the esoteric world of antiquarian bookselling, he is able to bring a formidable battery of literary firepower to bear on what the novel's blurb calls "one of the last taboos of the erotic life".
Nabokov, Joyce, Turgenev, Henry James, Shakespeare, as well as Sacher-Masoch and the Marquis de Sade - the list, he implies, is endless - are all wheeled on at one point or another to strengthen Felix's claims for the universality of his particular obsession.
Yet, for all the elucidation provided by this heavyweight brigade, the exact nature of Felix's desires remains somewhat obscure and difficult to understand, perhaps because they have more to do with the enlivening language of betrayal than they have with sexual satisfaction.
Felix's quest to be a cuckold begins on his honeymoon in Florida with Marisa, the wife he worships so tirelessly, whose capacity for infidelity he has already established by prising her away from her first husband, an ageing academic. When, semi-conscious due to a fever, Marisa undergoes a medical examination, Felix gets a thrill from witnessing her over-attentive Cuban doctor inspect her ("He had, I observed, the most beautiful long hands, with inordinate fringes of silky fur on every knuckle").
In this moment, Felix realises that: "Henceforth, given the choice, I would rather Marisa gave her breasts to a man who wasn't me. That was to be the condition, the measure, of my love for her." He is soon striving to make the enigmatic, do-gooding Marisa aware of his eagerness to be betrayed, and when her choice of lovers proves insufficiently unbearable for him, he begins the process of getting her together with the haughty, moustachioed Marius, an acquaintance on to whom he projects all the heartless potency he feels he himself lacks.
Felix's passive-aggressive manipulation of the unlikely Marius (whose name itself sounds like a command) takes the form of cryptic, highfalutin and slightly hysterical verbal encounters in the bookshops and cafes of west London, but is, Felix insists, nothing to do with overt sexual attraction.
For Felix, it's word games and literary allusions that matter: even when he has got his wife and Marius into bed with each other, his voyeurism consists mainly in hearing Marisa's descriptions of what they get up to (which may or may not be truthful).
Along with his masochism and his love of words, Felix's other distinguishing characteristic is his snobbery. When his assistant, Dulcie, turns up at work wearing an ankle chain (at her husband's request) to signal to other men that she is a "hot wife" available for extra-marital action, Felix is embarrassed by her tawdriness rather than relieved to find another couple who share his tastes. Her performance, he feels, does not match up to that of his own infinitely more enthralling spouse: "No truly trashy woman ever did trashy as Marisa did. In trash, as in everything else, sophistication is the first essential."
Felix ultimately gets his comeuppance and, with it, the opportunity to compare himself to other literary casualties such as Anna Karenina and Don Giovanni. But, this being Howard Jacobson, Felix is of course intended to be much more of a comic figure than a tragic one. Something goes awry with the humour in this book though: for all Jacobson's trademark wit, erudition and inventiveness, for all his insights into gender, domesticity and the crisis of masculinity, his narrator's unchanging clammy relentlessness starts to grate on the reader's nerves as much as it does on Marisa's. "Does it never stop for you?" she asks him wearily at one point, as he wheedles her towards yet another liaison.
There is a moment, during an experimental visit to a fetish club, when Felix finds himself overcome with the tedium of watching other people act out their perplexing fixations, a feeling readers may know well by the end of this novel. And once again, it is the eloquent Felix himself who sums things up best: "A pervert worth his salt knows that that's where his perversion really lies . . . Not in the menace posed by his obsession, but in its monotony."
Giles Newington is an Irish Times journalist