The Act of Love, By Howard Jacobson

The great drawback to these storm-crossed accounts of obsessional Stürm und Drang is the reader's reluctance to swallow what might be called the authorial first principle. The Act of Love encourages people not to take it seriously at the point where its hero unveils his romantic credo: "No man truly loves a woman... who does not know her to be lying in the arms of someone else."

I conducted a straw-poll of several gentlemen of my acquaintance and couldn't find anyone who believed this statement, but never mind. The important thing is that Felix Quinn, Jacobson's antiquarian bookseller hero, does, and that the conviction undermines his marriage to Marisa, a brisk, enigmatic woman whose desertion of her first husband confirms his successor's hunch that every man is an ecstatic cuckold at heart. Conducted in the genteel purlieus of Marylebone High Street, their relationship is (at any rate to Felix) a rhapsodic torture, a series of agonised, bug-eyed broodings on the inevitability – no, the desirability – of betrayal.

To the practical realities of adultery is appended a certain amount of theoretical ballast, some conversations about Nietzsche, several visits to the Wallace Collection and a spirited reinterpretation of Othello. Eventually, after an inconclusive scuffle with Quinn's distant cousin, the implausibly named Quirin, Marisa sets to work with a man named Marius, already known to her husband as the cuckolder of one of the bookshop's clients.

This is a reductive novel, and what it reduces itself to is sex. Even Quinn's professional life comes groaning under the weight of figurative baggage. Apparently the clients of antiquarian bookshops steal out of the door "like men afraid of being caught lurking in the vicinity of a brothel". Dear me, I shall never dare go into Henry Sotheran again. Sex, Quinn maintains, "inheres in everything, in books and their histories no less than in humans. Do we not, on a bus or a train, see people turning the pages of a book with a sensual expertise that reminds us of nothing so much as the act of undressing another person?"

One can just about believe in Quinn and the cast of cheery solipsists with whom he surrounds himself. However, our knowledge of the way his mind works makes it difficult to accept the vaguely redemptive ending. What compounds the reader's lurking sense of unease is the portentousness of the language, in which the smart remark ("Sometimes in Marisa's company, I could not escape the sensation that I was stealing her from herself") alternates with the sage observation ("Your chest is your prologue, Marisa") and those high-octane flourishes in which the adjectives hop brazenly to the front of the sentence ("Peerless she was in her men's tailoring and effrontery").

Full marks to Jacobson for his bracing cleverness and a reliably authentic line on male despair, but The Act of Love would have worked better had its treatment been less overwrought and its material less mundane.

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