The Act of Love: A Novel by Howard Jacobson

Jacobson has chosen to speak through this voice, which can be in turns tedious, ridiculous and overwrought. So we must blame Jacobson for, say, making small matters loom too large: the lined face “suggesting ecological catastrophe”; “the apocalyptic impatience” of desire; the end of an affair linked to “ruination as promised to the irreligious and irresolute in the language of the great unforgiving Bible of the Hebrews”.

The Act of Love insists that the act it describes is more important than it is: polyamory is “not a question that can be settled in a sentence, if it can be settled at all”.

Review: The Act of Love by Howard Jacobson - Telegraph.