ABSTRACT
Howard Jacobson was born in Manchester in 1942 and read English at Cambridge before beginning a career as an academic. Sefton Goldberg's Jewishness becomes central to the humour of "Coming from Behind" and it gives it a mordant, discomfiting edge that goes beyond other novels in the tradition in which Jacobson is working. Jacobson followed "Coming from Behind" with two other novels which similarly mixed erudite farce and erotic mishap, "Peeping Tom" and "Redback". In Jacobson's novel the threatening otherness, malignantly intent on destroying or, at the very least, humiliating his Jewish protagonist Leon Forelock, is represented by Australia. Six years passed before the publication of "The Very Model of a Man" (1992), an attempt to write fiction very different from the kind with which, by the early 1990s, Jacobson's name was associated. Through a retelling, informed by a modern sensibility, of the story of Cain and Abel, Jacobson creates a bleakly imaginative version of biblical myth.
