The Goldberg Variations by Mark Glanville

This musical Jewish lad became a 'Cockney Red' football thug. Matthew J Reisz finds out why

As a teenage football hooligan, Mark Glanville loved the terraces for "the rawness, the danger in the faces and stances of people who spat, and spilled their steaming tea and chewed their burgers open-mouthed in a pungent haze of fried onions and beer-fuelled farts". On one vividly described occasion, he was able to deal out rough justice to a supporter chanting anti-Semitic abuse.

It took him quite a while, mind you, to get his image right. On his first outing with "the Cockney Reds" (London Manchester United supporters), he turned up "in a very unstreetwise brown velvet jacket, perfect for browsing in antiquarian bookshops". The skinheads on the train were none too impressed by the taramasalata sandwiches his mother provided ("Sands like a fackin' disease!" "Fackin' tastes like one an' all!").

Yet despite their stories of vicious violence, Glanville finds himself "drawn by the outlaw status" of Tiger and his gang. When he gets a place at Oxford and doesn't want to lose face, he tells them he won't be able to attend matches for a few years because he's about to go to jail for manslaughter! Tiger kindly offers to save the programmes for him. Such are the pleasures, and the ironies, of life as a middle-class hooligan.

This gripping book is called The Goldberg Variations because the author's grandfather, a Lithuanian-Irish Jew, changed his name from Goldberg to Glanville when he arrived in England. In his struggle to find an authentic identity – and a way back to his Jewish roots – Mark Glanville adopts different personae or "variations". The hooligan becomes a lawless Oxford Classicist ("Television sets were half-inched from Junior Common Rooms; the contents of drinks cabinets from SCRs") and then an opera singer, striving to unite increasing vocal technique with the expression of feeling.

As one might expect, the book is also about Glanville's family background and the search for love. He offers a plausible account of the roots of his sexual difficulties: "Mum, in her anguish, had confided in me about Dad's womanising long before I was able to grasp its true significance and although ... I recognised her pain, I was at an age when I wanted to emulate Dad". So "somehow all seduction became tainted in my mind ... with the stigma of incest". He sets out, in painfully (and hilariously) self-lacerating detail, the progress of his love life.

We hear about every groped au pair, gauche remark, botched seduction and sexual failure, not to mention the girlfriend he accidentally buggered for three months ("I was grateful simply to have found an accepting entrance. It hadn't occurred to me that it might have been the wrong one"). Even his chat-up lines go awry. When he meets the woman he will marry, he asks if she has any West Indian blood. She bursts out laughing and replies: "Actually, half my relatives are rabbis."

Three of Glanville's four grandparents were also Jewish, but not the only one who counts (according to religious law): his maternal grandmother. Nonetheless, joining a synagogue feels like coming home, particularly when he discovers the shammas (senior warden) is a fellow football fanatic. There he can sing with an unselfconscious directness hard to achieve in professional performance. At his wedding, at last, all the different personae come together in harmony. This resolution may be a bit facile, but his journey of self-discovery is vivid, illuminating and compelling.

Matthew J Reisz is editor of the 'Jewish Quarterly'