Shylock is My Name, Howard Jacobson
Review by Rowena Hawkins, MA Shakespeare Studies
13
February 2016
Shylock is My Name isn’t the book that Booker Prize winning novelist Howard Jacobson wanted to contribute to the Hogarth Shakespeare. He wanted Hamlet, he told Radio 4’s ‘Front Row’, but since that play had already been allocated the Jewish writer had to take on Shakespeare’s problematic ‘Jewish play’, The Merchant of Venice. It’s perhaps not surprising, then, that there’s more than a hint of bitterness in his novel, a modern prose update set in Cheshire’s affluent Golden Triangle, nor that it’s littered with references to the tragic Prince of Denmark and his immortal soliloquies.
Simon Strulovitch is an art dealer, ‘fiery Shakespearean’, and single father battling with his religion and a beautiful wayward daughter. He finds a kindred spirit in Shylock, a shadowy figure too real to be imaginary but too obviously stripped from the early modern play to be real. Their often-fiery debates become Jacobson’s way of interrogating both The Merchant of Venice and Jewish manhood. Jacobson finds, to his frustration, that there are as few answers to be had now as Shakespeare offered way back when. Shylock, a living, breathing, grieving metaphor, is stubborn; the play ended, there is nothing more to say.
Denied closure, Jacobson instead flirts with timeless questions of faith and morality. He is particularly brilliant when writing about the difficult generational divide, or the agony of being caught between ‘us’ and ‘them’. It gets overly meta in places but Jacobson’s writing, meticulously crafted from modern language punctuated by literary references and Yiddish phrases, has an incredible texture. Things stand out from the page until it’s like Braille. You have to feel it to understand.
Away from Strulovitch’s stormy crises of faith and identity, the Portia character – quick-witted, Porsche-driving Anna Livia Plurabelle Cleopatra A Thing Of Beauty Is A Joy Forever Christine (Plurabelle for short, Plury for even shorter) - lives the shallow and glamorous life of a reality star. Her name is hard to read without a snigger and with it Jacobson makes a mockery of her before she even opens her mouth. But when well-intentioned Plury seeks a ‘Jewess’ to sate the desires of a footballer friend recently fined for a Nazi salute on the pitch it’s no longer fun and games. She quickly finds herself on the wrong side of Stroluvitch who, despite his attempts to distance himself from Shylock, finds himself baying for the blood of a Christian.
Though there are some beautiful surprises and moments of poetic dialogue, the ending of Shylock is My Name, surely intended as a plot twist, can be spotted a mile off and there are a few too many subplots for Jacobson to deal with without making several endings feel abrupt. But there’s still a lot to enjoy in this stylish novel. Writing with equal parts resentment and admiration, Jacobson doesn’t reclaim Shylock or Shakespeare’s problem play, nor does he aim to. Instead, Shylock is My Name documents the process of an author making his difficult peace with The Merchant of Venice.
Other reviews:http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/feb/14/shylock-is-my-name-by-howard-jacobson-digested-read-john-crace
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/shylock-is-my-name-by-howard-jacobson-book-review-a6825566.html
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/feb/07/my-name-is-shylock-review-howard-jacobson-shakespeare-merchant-of-venice