MOTHER’S BOY
A WRITER’S BEGINNINGS
HOWARD JACOBSON
Jonathan Cape, 288pp, £18.99
‘Has there ever been a funnier book about being gloomy?’ asked Craig Brown in the . ‘Jacobson is a meticulous chronicler of his own failing. Even as a baby he was a dead loss and from there on it was downhill all the way.’ Alex Clark in the described how, ‘Once Jacobson has thrown off the hated shackles of infancy he is reading books with his mother, who introduces him to the sorrows of Tennyson and Matthew Arnold and the escapism
