The Act Of Love, by Howard Jacobson

Felix Quinn, the narrator of Howard Jacobson's tenth novel, is a prosperous antiquarian bookseller, running the old family firm in Marylebone. He is a cultured, well-read bon vivant, quiveringly attuned to the arty and the sensual. Like his forbears, he "couldn't imagine ever living more than a few hundred yards from everything the soul and body of man requires: art galleries, concert halls, good restaurants, suppliers of wine and cheese, infirmaries, bordellos."

An homme moyen sensuel, you might think; but you'd be horribly wrong. Felix's problem, and it's quite a sizeable one, is that he is a masochist of a specialised kind: a connoisseur of sexual jealousy, who not only longs for his wife to find a lover, but arranges for it to happen. Felix is sure it's a universal, if mostly unspoken, secret desire. "No man has ever loved a woman, and not imagined her in the arms of someone else," he assures us. "No husband is ever happy – truly, genitally happy, happy at the very heart of himself as a husband – until he has proof positive that another man is fucking her."

You may wonder what his wife's view of marital fidelity (and harmony) might be. Marisa Quinn is a well-off, finishing-schooled, coolly independent woman, indulged by her rich father, secretive and hard to know. As though to compensate for her lack of moral backbone, she spends her time performing good works: pricing books in an Oxfam shop, reading to blind men, manning the Samaritans phone lines. She is also in her second marriage, having been stolen by Felix from her first husband, a musicologist called Freddie. She is, to employ the language of antiquarian booksellers, a very nice second-hand copy, only slightly foxed.

Felix adores her, worships her, coos over details of her body and mind – until one day, on their honeymoon in Florida, he watches as a Cuban doctor attends to a feverish Marisa, and Felix is turned on by the sight of the doctor's hands on her breasts. Henceforth, he becomes a monomaniacal cuckold, helplessly in love with what he most dreads will happen, determined to steer men in the direction of his adored other half, desperate to be betrayed, or at least to have his suspicions of betrayal deliciously confirmed. He becomes that vital figure in the postmodern novel, the Untrustworthy Narrator, detecting fancied infidelities in every move his wife makes, assuring us of her imminent abandon even as we suspect her to be wholly innocent.

The climax of his endeavours is to throw her into bed with Marius, a cruel, decadent, morally bankrupt, sexually incontinent bad egg whom fate keeps throwing in Felix's way. Marius is an extraordinary character. He speaks in a curious idiolect, now high-flown discourse about time and Thanatos, now Estuary slang ("Ta, doll."). He grows walrus moustaches "like a Swedish adventurer's", and twirls them like a silent-movie villain when he meets Marisa. To Felix, he is "the eternal rake or roué, who must make any man not a rake or roué worry about his potency." After Felix sees his wife and her putative lover exchange appraising glances in a London cheese shop, he puts his dark plan to work: he's a middle-class Pandarus, a Leontes encouraging his Hermione to stray. As Marius and Marisa get it together, she agrees to tell Felix, night after night, every detail of their passionate affair. But can her words be a fiction, concealing a more subtle reality?

You may find Felix's obsession pitiful; you may find his theory about the appeal of cuckoldry preposterous. But it's Howard Jacobson's genius that, through 300 pages, he uses Felix's perversion as a torture garden in which a hundred interlinked images, theories, arguments, stories and literary allusions flourish and blossom. The dust jacket bears the rare insignia of a quote from Harold Pinter, and we may be reminded that Pinter explored the eternal threesome in his fine, back-to-front play Betrayal. But Jacobson's central conceit of connived-at adultery has many literary antecedents – notably in James Joyce's play Exiles, and in the ambiguous horror-cum-delight with which Leopold Bloom, in Ulysses, imagines his wife Molly's afternoon tryst with the dashing Blazes Boylan – whom Marius rather resembles, twirling moustaches and all.

Elsewhere, the volitional nature of Othello's jealousy is explored, the story of Anselmo and Lothario's "fidelity test" in Don Quixote gets an airing, as does the tale, in Herodotus's Histories, of Candaules, King of Lydia, who, deranged by love for his wife, arranges for a servant called Gyges to spy on her nakedness. Images of erotic despair, of scheming husbands and sex in the presence of a third party, stud the narrative. When Marius and Marisa first flirt, it's after she has given a lecture, at the Wallace Collection, about a portrait of Lady Blessington, who dallied with a French count with her husband's approval.

Even when the lovers leave notes for each other to find (Jacobson's plotting is pure Restoration comedy), it's behind paintings of Roman threesomes. Jacobson makes huge claims for willed infidelity as the driving force behind the best literature. He even proposes that God is "the immortal cuckold" in creating man, whose instant response is to start worshipping other gods.

Moving through this whirling phantasmagoria of ideas is like watching a conjuror keeping 42 multicoloured plates spinning. But Jacobson doesn't neglect old–fashioned novelistic virtues. His charting of the fathomless depths of Felix's degradation – as he visits a vividly described fetish club, as he sneaks ever closer to seeing his wife and Marius physically entwined – is a delicate balancing of comedy, tragedy and pathos. The dialogue, especially between Felix and the suspicious Marisa, crackles like a wood fire. Jacobson's unique prose style combines the Augustan balance of 18th-century Enlightenment writing with Nabokovian conceit and elegant modern aphorisms.

Little grace notes suggest this whole cathedral of knotty argumentation and metaphysical wrangling is all a front. Is Felix driven by a simple concern, that a woman who abandoned one husband (for him) might abandon him? Are all his grandstanding theories just ways of ensuring he won't be surprised when the inevitable happens? As stumbles appear in Felix's masochistic swagger, you start to glimpse real human suffering behind the flow of pervy persiflage. The Act of Love is a startling achievement: shocking, argumentative, funny, rude, querulous, intellectually bracing, and ceaselessly fascinated by the imaginative fecundity of desire and destruction.

Classic affairs

Gustave Flaubert, 'Madame Bovary': a straying wife is doomed by bourgeois destiny. Leo Tolstoy, 'Anna Karenina': wild romance loses its allure, repeats the woes of wedlock.

Henry James, 'The Golden Bowl': secret lovers are trapped in a pattern fixed far in the past.

James Joyce, 'Ulysses': sin dwindles into a trivial peccadillo under the gaze of indifferent stars.

Graham Greene, 'The End of the Affair': illicitdesire opens a mysterious gateway into faith.