Howard Jacobson: Why should Susan Boyle have to curry favour with this squalid culture?
Try to break this circle and you’ll go mad. Best just to hop on to the dream and dream it. This is shlock’s ultimate victory. Dream the dream or you’re a dead man. What do you suppose Ahmadinejad sang in the shower after socking it to the Swiss? “I dreamed a dream.” I was away when all this was going on. Lying in the sun, clearing my mind, reading a masterly novel called Karoo by Steve Tesich. If you haven’t read Karoo, read it. Drop whatever else you’re reading. It won’t be as good as Karoo. It certainly won’t be as funny. Genuine funny, so funny you can’t breathe, because only a truly calamitous novel can ever be a truly funny novel. And Karoo is a novel of more calamity than one can bear to read. In the final chapters you wonder how the novelist could bear to write it. And he couldn’t. He died before the novel was published. A writer in his fifties who imagined calamity. As I said, dream the dream or you’re a dead man. Karoo is a novel about Nothingness, what the hero Saul Karoo cal
