What a strange and unpredictable writer Howard Jacobson is. His last outing, Kalooki Nights, was a warm, baggy, digressive, multitude-containing comic novel. And he has followed it up with an introverted, sparsely populated, geometrically put-together little drama of sexual neurosis. It is as if Philip Roth (the writer to whom Jacobson is endlessly compared, and whom he resembles at his most expansive) went to bed one evening and awoke from uneasy dreams to find himself transformed into Vladimir Nabokov.

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