NO MORE MISTER NICE GUY

by Howard Jacobson

Jonathan Cape, #15.99

HOWARD Jacobson is a 56-year-old, Jewish, television critic and author, who has written a novel about a 50-year-old, Jewish, television critic. It is said that all first novels are in some way autobiographical, but Jacobson has left it to his fifth work of fiction to create an ostensible doppelganger in Frank Ritz - albeit six years younger. All is vanity, it seems when it comes to age.

Ritz, thrown out by his feminist partner, goes on his own Kerouac-style trip of discovery in reverse, from the comfort of a Saab, as he searches for the places and people from his youthful past, when pulling birds, sex and, um, more sex, were all that he lived for.

This is middle-aged man's angst, more bitter than biting on a cargo-hold of lemons, as he recalls a mindless past of numerous couplings, and wonders what was it all about.

Certainly such introspection is not that common among male writers, but perhaps as the inhabitants of the Swinging Sixties reach the age where libido disappears quicker than a Tory majority, then more will follow Jacobson and drag themselves from the swamp of sybaritic pleasure on to the dry land of forced abstention.

Ritz's, and presumably Jacobson's point, is that years of womanising leave you ill-prepared for later life when you cannot think of anything else to do.

The problem for Jacobson is that memories of past carnal conquests are like dreams - very vivid no doubt to the person who experienced them, but pretty bloody boring to everyone else. So, while the book can be praised for accurately capturing the unsettled mood of the reminiscing Ritz, it leaves the reader fairly untouched.

Perhaps if you are a middle-aged television reviewer living a comfortable life in the South of England with little to worry about, then you can identify with the supposed problems of Frank Ritz. Others will see the character as a self-obsessed whinger. And as the book sticks doggedly with Ritz through his half-hearted voyage of discovery to places like Oxford, Cheltenham, and Gloucester, there is no escaping his emptiness.

Yes Frank Ritz is a finely drawn character, but 10 minutes in his company in a bar and you would be making your excuses to move elsewhere. Unfortunately the book makes you feel the same.