The Finkler question, by Howard Jacobson

Winner of the Man Booker Prize, this book left me with one overwhelming question - what were they thinking?? Generally I enjoy the type of literary fiction that is so honored. It probably didn't help that it was also the first thing I read on my Kindle, which made me wonder if it was the medium or the message I was not taken with. No, it's the book, whether in print or e-ink. Our book club members uniformly hated it -- some refused to finish it. Perhaps, thought I, I'd "get" it more if I was Jewish -- because the "Finkler" question is just that. But the Jews in our group disliked it even more than I did. A hapless middle-aged goy, Julian Treslove, has a good friend, Sam Finkler, and an older teacher and mentor, Libor Sevcik, who are both Jewish. After a dinner together memorializing the recently deceased wives of his friend and mentor, Treslove is mugged on the way home and becomes convinced that the mugger thought he was Jewish and it was an anti-Semitic act, not a simple robbery. He decides he really is a Jew, and in the way of some converts, becomes almost a parody of the adopted belief. I'm sure that this must have seen as some ironic, witty, and trenchant statement about thousands of years of Jewish identity and what it means to be Jewish in the 21st century, but sorry, I don't get it. In fact, it's taken me well over a month to want to even blog about it. 320 pp.