A SERIOUS MAN?

Howard Jacobson, J: A Novel (London & New York: Hogarth, 2014) ("A life was owned by the person who lived it, he believed. What happened didn't always happen because you wanted it to, but what you made of it was your responsibility. Help there was little and gods there were none. We are the authors of our own consequences, if not always of our own actions." "The credo of a serious man. You could be too serious, he didn't doubt that. But his birthright was his birthright. No one can make me, he thought, feeling the spray on his cheeks." Id. at 342. "'You have an unfortunate tendency to overwrite, her supervisor said when he had read the whole report. 'May I suggest you read fewer novels.'" Id. at 17. "'It's a great intellectual privilege to work in a library,' she reminded him. 'The Argentinian writer Borges was a librarian. The English poet Philip Larkin was a librarian.' Kevern hadn't heard of either of them. 'All human life is here,' she went on. 'The best of it and the worst of it, mainly the worst. Books do that, they bring out the bad in readers if there's bad already in them.' 'And if there isn't?' She smiled at him and stroked her pigtail. 'Then they bring out the good. As in me, I hope. I've been able to read a lot here." Id. at 211-212.).