Two middle-aged men, friends, both married; one loves four women - his mother, his wife and his two daughters but is also in love with five other women.
The other man is completely in love with his wife, they converse in sugary platitudes, every day is lashings of love and "nice sex", and, oh yes, together they write books for children. These contrasting husbands, Kreitman and Merriweather, meet regularly for lunch and, surprise, surprise, the loving, good husband has begun wondering about, even envying, the exciting time enjoyed by the rogue husband.
Those few details may well be enough to put most readers off writer Howard Jacobson's seventh novel - except for the fact that Jacobson is capable of being very, very funny. (This romp of romps has been Booker long-listed in a selection that excludes Tim Lott's human and profound Rumours of a Hurricane and, most shockingly, John McGahern's That They May Face the Rising Sun. Still, Jacobson's novel is here under review not Booker scrutiny.)
One of the most interesting things about him is that he appears intent on subverting the notion of fiction, never mind life, as a serious business. Even at his most banal he somehow creates the impression that there may be - or may not be - an alternative text lurking here that you won't want to miss. Jacobson, author of The Mighty Walzer, also has the habit of writing well above his material, lowly enough at times, often the stuff of sexual relationships sit-com style.
So far, so goodish. "You can often learn a lot about a man from the sorts of bedtime stories he tells his children", begins Who's Sorry Now? Marvin Kreitman, the rogue husband, is an emotional disaster area who sells expensive luggage and handbags. Funnyish in a manic, exaggerated fashion, he seems to be sufficiently rich, having benefited from years of labour spent building up the business by his old father, to devote his waking hours to the pursuit of half-baked sexual games with a variety of often older women. Meanwhile, his wife, Hazel, has matured into a cynic, wondering where she went wrong while having to contend with a mother who still mentions an almost-boyfriend who came and went some 20 years ago.
Jacobson ensures our attention shifts eagerly between the various players. Charlie, the happy husband with growing doubts, is married to a wife also called Charlie. She appears almost as awkward as he is. But considering Charlie, the good husband's background, he is not only happy to be married to Charlie his wife, he is grateful for his gooey marriage.
"He had been a shy boy. Up to a point they had all been shy boys. Being a boy is a shying business. Over and above that, though, he'd been an unlucky boy. He was the child of odder than usual parents. The son of a more handsome than usual mother. And of a sadder than usual father.
Few of his friends went home to happy households at the weekend, but Charlie knew of no one who went home to find his father quaking under the kitchen table in his raincoat." Charlie's father, a headmaster, is also given to performing impromptu cartwheels.
As is obvious, Jacobson has effectively penetrated the world of middle-class English humour. But the trick, and trick it is, is the way in which he can balance the obvious with a hint of subtle intrigue. "What everybody found personable about Nyman was his absence of personality. Nyman too found this personable about himself." Nyman is both irrelevant and very important as he is a cyclist and for a time, a courier, who crashes into Kreitman and in a way becomes central to the plot.
Plot is to be mentioned here with some caution. Jacobson's concept of it is about as shaky, or as deliberately irrelevant as it could be. Again, this is true to his approach. On one level, the plot is tissue-thin, a farce in which two husbands, without having actually planned it, end up swapping their very different wives. And for a time, it works.
Throughout the narrative, such as it is, he is playing for laughs and also calling for communal weeping. Marvin Kreitman is a joke whose own wife, Hazel, in attempting to explain to him why he is such a disaster, reminds him ". . . you're a wooer, Marvin. Because you have no choice. People have to notice you, be fascinated by you, then love you. Women, preferably. But if no new woman happens to be present, you'll make do with something else. It's the way you operate." Although Marvin's protests are predictably crummy, Jacobson allows him a finer inner life. "No wonder he was upset all the time. The more you had to do with women the more sadness you encountered." Marvin reflects, "Once upon a time I could have gone over to her".
It is true to the book, the high and the low; funnyish and almost sad - except that Jacobson's faceless, if ridiculous, characters are walk-on actors from whatever BBC sit-com could spare them. While emotional lives and personal histories unravel before our eyes, one character keeps her thoughts firmly focussed on the facial exercises she believes are controlling her wrinkles. Her preoccupation allows Jacobson a few gags along the way. It is interesting that most of the funnier lines are authorial asides. Jacobson is not too committed to characterisation.
The funniest scene takes place at a gym where Kreitman and his unlikely new love-obsession rendezvous. Prior to joining the gym in order to see his beloved, he allows us into his scrambled thoughts as well as the realities of the plot: "You don't take on lightly a woman whose husband has left her, a woman whose husband has left her for your wife and whose voice has risen to perilous heights." Having finally gained access to the gym, he surveys the woman he now thinks he loves. "How did she look? Shit was how she looked. But who was he to talk? They both looked shit, just like the last time they'd met. Was that their fate, always to look shit for each other?" However crude it is, this is yet another example of Jacobson subverting conventional romance and its language as well as all notions of narrative and fiction itself.
Once the spouses are exchanged the novel enters an alternative world of fantasy and nightmare. Funnyish and often cleverish, this is amusing stuff mainly because Jacobson again rises above his material. But for all the tricks, snarls of exasperation and the fluidity of the writing, Who's Sorry Now? is far too long, manages to stay only a step or two above the level of most English middle-brow sexual farces and is never quite as funny as it thinks it is.
• Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of the Irish Times
Who's Sorry Now? By Howard Jacobson.Cape, 326 pp. £16.99 sterling
