’Because he was Jewish and short and knew all the answers they loved him in return’. Meet Sefton Goldberg, lecturer, lover, comic hero; the recipient of this unexpected adoration. If Bernard Malamud identified the literary product of ’urbanised Jew in a goyishe pastorale’, then Howard Jacobson expanded the franchise and gave it a particularly British flavour. Coming From Behind is a campus novel from the Malcolm Bradbury/David Lodge school of British academic manners which follows the picaresque adventures of its Jewish protagonist with all of the attendant self-absorption, gossip, egomania, envy and intrigue.

The novel is more character than plot-driven and the story itself is secondary to the purpose of the novel, an examination of the interactions of its Jewish character with a typically English inner-city college and the people who work in it. The book, set in ’Wrottesley Polytechnic’, includes a variety of amusing descriptions of Sefton Goldberg’s pronounced aversion to the bleak gentile environs, before establishing the plot around the removal of the Twentieth Century Studies Department to the Wrottesley Ramblers football ground and Sefton Goldberg’s attempts to be awarded the Disraeli Fellowship at Cambridge and thereby leave Wrottesley for good.

The action is constantly interrupted by reminiscences of family life (in particular his father’s conjuring tricks), academic and boyhood rivalries, professional misconduct and a variety of peccadilloes, misplaced affections and petty vanities. Along the way we meet a cast of characters which includes Cora Peck, a radical feminist pornographer with a Ph.D. in masturbation, the bookishly reverential Jacqueline, whom Sefton relieves of all innocence, and Sir Evelyn Woolfardisworthy, Master of Holy Christ College, Cambridge whose vowels make Laurence Olivier sound like an East End publican.

This is a book for those familiar with the idiosyncrasies of the Jewish family, the portrayal of the Jewish man as intellectual satyr and the supposed hostilities of a non-Jewish environment — the literary type most recognisable in Philip Roth. While Jacobson’s hero constantly flirts with self-destruction, he is always granted a degree of humour which secures redemption over self-imposed furies.

’The light trickle of perspiration down Sefton Goldberg’s back had now swollen into a river. Already he couldn’t distinguish his shirt from his skin. In another five minutes the cheque book in his breast pocket and the little wad of paper money in his trousers would be sodden. He hoped that he wasn’t going to be expected to pay for anything before he had the chance to dry out. Sherry and dinner, presumably were free, and a game of brag or poker didn’t look imminent. But what if a collection plate were to be passed round at some point in the evening? Didn’t Christians always have some nave or chancel (whatever they were) in need of repair? What then would be the effect on Woolfardisworthy (who had in all likelihood been kept away from Jews by a strict family and solicitous friends) of seeing Sefton Goldberg produce a couple of steaming one-ers from somewhere in the region of his groin? That would confirm an ancient Christian rumour or two, would it not?’