The Making of Henry by Howard Jacobson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Recovering From the Love of Women

The eponymous Henry is, not to put too fine a point on it, a sissy, a mama'a boy, a wuss (or perhaps in North Manchester a wuzz). Not effeminate or gay, but born into, raised, protected and launched, if that isn't too active a verb, by a bevy of women who adored him. The result was predictable, and indeed predicted by Henry's father: he, Henry, became a girl. That is to say, he had no interest in auto mechanics, an incapacity with tools, little desire for male mate-ship, and a lifelong preference for older women, even when they were younger than he.

I share Henry's debilitating pedigree: a beautiful mother, two devoted grandmothers, a married aunt without children, a maiden aunt who thought I could be the Messiah, and even a clutch of great-aunts, known even in their dotage, like Henry’s entourage, as The Girls. My identification with Henry is intense. So I can feel his dismay and confusion about adult life, not because the world at large is more brutal or unsympathetic than the warm nest created and maintained by loving women, but because, as Jacobson says bluntly, "Women died." The only thing a man brought up by adoring women can do when they die is pine in a resentful, clumsy, perpetually childish way: “Without a woman in his life, Henry was like the world before God created it. Nothing but flying fragments...Trouble was - order was death. Chaos life, order death.”

Recovery from the loss of loving women can take some time, perhaps a life-time. There is, in short, no free lunch. The Making of Henry is a story of how payment can be made - told with wit, humour and sensitivity that is accessible universally, not just within Jacobson’s Mancunian Jewish oeuvre.

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