Coming From Behind

by Howard Jacobson

Sefton mid-thirties, English teacher at Wrottesley Poly in the West Midlands; small, sweaty, lustful, defiantly unappreciative of beer, nature and organized games; gnawingly aware of being an urban Jew islanded in a sea of country-loving Anglo-Saxons. Obsessed by failure so much so that he plans to write a bestseller on the subject. In the meantime, he is uncomfortably aware of advancing years and atrophying achievement, and no amount of lofty rationalization can disguise the triumph of friends and colleagues, not only from Cambridge days but even within the despised walls of the Poly itself, or sweeten the bitter pill of another’s success.

Genres: Fiction, Humor, British Literature, 20th Century, Book Club, Comedy, Novels

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1984

About the author

Howard Jacobson was born in Manchester, England, and educated at Cambridge. His many novels include The Mighty Walzer (winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize), Who’s Sorry Now? and Kalooki Nights (both longlisted for the Man Booker Prize), and, most recently, The Act of Love. Jacobson is also a respected critic and broadcaster, and writes a weekly column for the Independent. He lives in London.

Profile of Howard Jacobson in The New York Times.

“The book's appeal to Jewish readers is obvious, but like all great Jewish art — the paintings of Marc Chagall, the books of Saul Bellow, the films of Woody Allen — it is Jacobson's use of the Jewish experience to explain the greater human one that sets it apart. Who among us is so certain of our identity? Who hasn't been asked, "What's your background" and hesitated, even for a split second, to answer their inquisitor? Howard Jacobson's The Finkler Question forces us to ask that of ourselves, and that's why it's a must read, no matter what your background.”—-David Sax, NPR.

Reviews

[Emma · Rating 3 out of 5]

It took me a while to get into this but I'm glad I did. This book follows a British English literature professor at a polytechnic who is just generally quite bitter, jealous and involved in department politics.

[Debbie Windley · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have re-read this 20 odd years after my first introduction to Howard Jacobson. Its still funny altho this time around I was aware of its self consciousness and would guess that Jacobson would probably not be too keen on re-reading it himself.
What was very new about the experience this time was that I am now a lecturer in what was once a northern polytechnic now up-graded to a Metropolitan Uni. Although we are 26 years on from when this was first published the themes remain much the same. The twinning of the poly with the local football team had me howling with laughter and recognition, as my institution has virtually established a faculty at a renowned sporting ground and is still extracating itself from financial deals supposedly of mutual benefit.
The renaming of departments to sound 'relevant' and less 'elitist' rang resounding bells; surely it can't be long before we too have a Dept of Modern Languages for Business and one for Twentieth Century Studies. Generalisation reigns supreme and knowledge for any sake but commerce, industries and the professions would now appear to be something we cannot afford.

So the book which first turned me on to Jacobson's hilarious struggle to maintain composure in a Goyisher world hasn't dated too badly. His more recent books have become far more visceral the language sharper with less need to show off than this first novel seemed to require.

[Mattia Ravasi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Video review

Its target audience is admittedly narrow - UK-based literature academians - but if you fall in the category, by heavens, you'll struggle to find a funnier, bitier, more insightful novel.

[Jerrymel George · Rating 3 out of 5]

Howard Jacobson is an exceptionally witty writer and Coming from Behind cements that fact.In Sefton Goldberg, we have the quintessential underachiever, who can only scoff at his peers' achievements or lack thereof.Its the humour that holds the novel together rather than the plot.The novel does lose steam towards the end, as is the case with his other creations.Read if you are a Jacobson fan.

[Michael Braccia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderfully un-PC and very funny. You will discover on the first page of chapter one why Sefton Goldberg is ‘as blind as a school photographer’ and why he is concerned about ‘the little metal nipple on his Yale lock’. To find out, you just have to read this book. The novel might offend a few minorities except those brilliant people I know who are both part of a minority group AND have a great sense of humour. However, what I admire about Jacobson is that he is prepared (and brave enough) to be critical of everyone if necessary, including his main character and himself. As an ex-college lecturer I could relate to many of the incidents. Parking my car in someone else’s space at Dudley College for starters! (I’ll never forget it).

I like the way that Jacobson veers from sometimes embarrassingly straightforward language to the subtleties of a great writer. Sefton Goldberg had ‘known’ a local librarian and ex-student, Jacqueline, in the past and he described their previous encounter. I would like to add ‘so to speak’ after ‘declared their regard’.

‘They had declared their regard for one another at a party just before she left the Polytechnic.’

Sefton, the main character, is obviously intellectual, but internally had a great skill for putting himself down. His relatively sheltered upbringing restricts his knowledge of the way ‘normal’ people behave, but as the novel develops we start to realise just how normal he is, albeit paranoid about his Jewishness. You can’t help but warm to Sefton for this. The inadequacies and lack of confidence of a young college lecturer are described beautifully by Howard Jacobson.
Hopefully avoiding spoilers (this bit won’t make sense until you read the book), but I’m sure you will take the journey with Sefton wondering to the very end whether he will ever discover the level of Cora’s ‘special expertise’. It wasn’t like that at Dudley College or, indeed, Wolverhampton University which I think is the inspiration for Wrottesley Polytechnic. ‘Wolves Uni’ (the name I gave it as a student) wasn’t a university at the time the novel was written, but a Polytechnic.

Howard Jacobson’s novels need to be read.

Michael Braccia

[Jenni · Rating 4 out of 5]

Funny and strikingly relevant to today's higher education sector.

[Vishvapani · Rating 3 out of 5]

I paid £1 for Coming from Behind in a charity shop, so that's a good thing, and Howard Jacobson can be pleased that he has contributed to cancer research. It has dated badly, but it's funny because it's clever and verbal.

As a Jew who did an English degree at Cambridge, I got the contrast of hairy, sweaty Jewish intellectualism versus etiolated gentile entitlement, which is the source of a lot of the humour - a la Jackie Mason - especially when he gets going in one of the blackly witty rants that he does more and better in his later books and make him such a great columnist and broadcaster. My favourite was the passage where he wonders whether nature or football is less Jewish.

Sefton, Jacobson's alter ego throbs and alludes and disparages goyim all through the book. But what fascinated me most was the aggressively self-asserting sexism. I really don't think there is another word for the 'date' with Cora - a punky, feminist fiction writer who dresses mainly in black and estranges herself from Sefton by actually liking her Midland students rather than disdaining all those who don't want to have sex with him. She proffers conventionally radical opinions on literary and cultural matters that wither beneath his sarcasm, while his attention is fixed mainly on her breasts, which offend him for their failure to accept the role he would assign them:

'And the breasts, the left one of which it now seemed was winking him over? Well, he had misread the message. He has always known, there was no possible way, in the second half of the twentieth century, that the breasts on a woman like Cora Peck could be anything other than aggressive weapons, at the very least, and at the best a sow of strength in an uneasy peace; but he had supposed that they knew some of the joys of fraternising with the enemy and that they had whispered to him, as they bobbed and weaved, 'We'll betray our side if you'll betray yours.' Upon receipt of which information he had acted, he could see now, with the most foolish promptitude. He had given and not got back. In a word he had been hoodwinked' p.91.

I kept wondering if this sort of thing was ironic, and a lot of the humour turns on Sefton's evident faults. But those faults are celebrated even as they are exposed. 'This is who I am,' Jacobson is saying. 'I'm really clever, bloody funny and much more interesting than the other characters. Follow me.' Of course, there is a splash of Kingsley Amis in this, but mostly it's Heller and Bellow and a lot of Roth; and Jacobson wants to be Britain's answer to the American Jewish alpha male novelist. And he is: he's as funny as the best of them, and his presence is on the way, here to the considerable heights of novels like Kalooki Nights.

But he also has Sefton say that the real purpose of being an academic is that you get to have sex with students. He calls gays poofters. And he describes the inarticulate grunts of a football crowd as the closest 'anyone on the Midlands was prepared to let language come to him.'

[Hilary · Rating 3 out of 5]

Having read good reviews of Jacobson’s recently published memoir, I decided it was time to tackle one of the several novels of his on my bookshelves. This, his first, is a campus novel set in a polytechnic in the Midlands and centres around the experiences of Sefton Goldberg, an English Lit lecturer who adopts a sardonic attitude to work and life through disillusionment with his career, his students and his life. Jacobson assumes his readers are well-read and will recognise the many references to literary characters, on which much of the humour relies, though this is more of the amusing kind than laugh-out-loud moments.

It’s a bit of its era now and I found it interesting that today’s writers might think twice about many of the descriptions and references he makes in the pre “woke” time when this novel was written. There was certainly a greater freedom of thought and expression than seems to be the case now – whether that’s good or bad is up to the reader to decide.

For my part I enjoyed it and will certainly read more of his work, including the memoir as I am curious to know just how autobiographical this work is.

[Michael Moseley · Rating 2 out of 5]

Quite an odd book that should have not suggested for the book club if I had know about the opening sex scheme which I would have to discuss with my mothering law. A look at the internal politics of a 70’s politics. Not a book from the same author as a Mann booker prize winner. I did not find it funny.

[Judy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I LOVE this book. It is so incredibly funny and dead-on in its insights - especially about Jews and football. Anytime I need a laugh, I reread the part about Sefton trying to decide what is the most un-Jewish thing, and he finally decides on football. So, so true. I also loved the depictions of his parents and "Doesn't she bubble like champagne?"

[Wendy · Rating 3 out of 5]

The plot and twists and turns kept me reading this. It was wryly amusing in parts. I found the characters were a little far fetched and I stopped and started when reading it. It was amusing but, as it had been recommended as a really funny, perceptive book, it fell short of my expectations a little.

[Vanessa Edwards · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the cleverest and funniest books I've ever read. Really enjoyable.

[Pippa Catterall · Rating 4 out of 5]

A university sector in crisis, humanities teaching being pushed to be relevant’ (in this case by getting twinned with the local football club), and disdainful academics literally tearing apart both literary heroes and each other. At times this bitterly funny novel feels like an only slightly exaggerated pastiche of contemporary campus life. It’s surely semi-autobiographical and feels a bit like a Tom Sharpe work with a heavy Jewish overlay and set in a poly rather than Cambridge. Yet that Jewishness, combined with a masculinity that renders the female characters often merely foils for the obsessive insecurities of the novel’s anti-hero, gives Jacobson’s first book a flavour that is all his own.

[PHILIP MATTHEWS · Rating 2 out of 5]

I had really hoped to enjoy this book - partly because the premise intrigued me, and partly because I came across Howard Jacobson on a podcast he piqued my interest (particularly his comments about the Jewish sense of humour)... Unfortunately, I found the prose pretty constipated and could barely get halfway through... Sorry Howard!

[David Gagen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hilarious, savage take-down of academia's self-absorption and jealousies.

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

A wonderful and snappy satire on Higher Ed in the UK in the 2000s / 2010s, and even now. I enjoyed it!

[Tony Lawrence]

I have serendipitously acquired 2 copies of this - Jacobson's first novel - so I will probably read one and keep one :)

[Frank Ware · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favourite of the books I read in 2024. Sefton Goldberg is such an entertainingly horrible character

[Art · Rating 5 out of 5]

Howard Jacobson's first Novel. Very humorous, scandalous. Reports from Jacobson's personal life suggest that it is very biographical.

[Peter Gaskin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very funny

[James M · Rating 4 out of 5]

A failing university plans to merge with a local football club, while a Jewish teacher craves literary success.

[Catherine · Rating 2 out of 5]

The humor was subtle & delightful & totally necessary because without it I would have stopped reading