The Antipodes are the setting for crucial incidents in the pursuit of Ableman's other pre-occupation: consuming, irrational lust. He is bedevilled by sex, particularly but not exclusively involving the impossibly glamorous Vanessa and her mother. In keeping with Jacobson's chronicle of the absurd, this larger than life pair come into Ableman's life in the definitively bourgeois setting of his family's dress shop in the well-heeled suburb of Wilmslow, a retreat famous in Britain for housing a disproportionate number of footballers.
But it is in Australia where his lubricious impulses towards his mother-in-law shift ever more perilously and ludicrously from fantasies of lust to physical reality. As ever for a writer, the stuff of life becomes grist for the mill and Ableman flirts with turning his infatuation with his flame-haired, high-breasted mother-in-law into a book. Meanwhile, Vanessa is following her own literary ambitions.
Ableman's mind is wild, dirty and whirling but Jacobson's prose is always under tight control as he shifts in time and setting in language that is bursting with energy but completely disciplined.
His cast delivers more entertainment even when they are caricatures like the film director Dirk de Wolff and the fantasy writer Garth Rhodes Rhind and some of the more fully realised characters like Ableman's brother Jeffrey, who turns away from his boutique to recapturing his Jewish identity as Yafet, are as entrancing as Vanessa.
The plot, a framework scorned by Ableman, is slight but it provided enough narrative drive amid the satire to keep this reader hooked until the end of this thoroughly enjoyable novel.
The literary book may be heading for extinction but in hands like Jacobson's, it is going down fighting.
John Gardner is an Auckland reviewer.
