Trump’s rise fuels Pussy, a rage-filled satire by Howard Jacobson

Howard Jacobson has not let caution and the passage of time cool his response to the US President’s ascendancy.

Detail from the cover of Howard Jacobson’s novel Pussy.

Everyone will have their own epiphany when it comes to understanding Donald Trump. Maybe the hyper-bullying handshake, or the rude shoulder butting of the Prime Minister of Montenegro, or the thumbs up to his followers and thumbs down to his critics. Mine came with the report of the Time magazine journalists invited to dine at the White House.

Dessert was chocolate cream pie and vanilla ice cream, two scoops for the President, one for each of his guests. Etiquette 101 recommends treating guests with generosity and courtesy rather than petty humiliation. There is something demeaning and vulgar in this calculated insult that speaks to the character of the man who everyday makes a mockery of the cliche leader of the free world. My dessert is bigger than yours, I’m the President and you’re not. That seems to be standard operating procedure for the incumbent.

The image of dinner chez Trump is reminiscent of Pauline Hanson’s ungracious response to Sam Dastyari’s invitation, on ABC television’s Q&A, to share a halal snack pack. It bespeaks a lack of generosity, a failure of imagination, a deep fear and stubborn refusal to explore the unknown.

The Trump presidency continues to be surprisingly inept, unprofessional, gaffe-prone and wilfully ignorant. The much-vaunted transformation of America where citizens enjoy full employment is yet to be delivered, while illegal immigrants are deported and health insurance is restricted to the rich.

What Trump has delivered, most surprisingly, is an extraordinary boost in support for serious journalism. In that context, he is the gift that keeps on giving. Much to his chagrin, journalism has been revitalised, the decline in subscriptions halted and the mandate for independent and rigorous analysis is suddenly urgent and valued.

Novelists usually take longer than the fourth estate to make sense of the issues of the day. So it is most welcome that Howard Jacobson did not let caution and the passage of time cool his response to the Trump ascendancy. In the great literary tradition of 18th-century satirists such as Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope, he has written a splendid novel fuelled by rage.

An optimist may read Pussy as a fairytale. For the gloomy realist, it is more of a cautionary tale in the style of Heinrich Hoffmann’s terrifying Der Struwwelpeter collection; more horror than happiness, with lessons learned the hard way rather than with sweetly gentle instruction. If The Audacity of Hope explained the education of a young man who one day would become the US’s 44th president, Pussy is the antithesis, an anti-bildungsroman with a decidedly uneducable hero.

Prince Fracassus has inherited his father’s “tiny eyes indicative of petty grievance, the pout of pettishness, and a head of hair already like the colour of the Palace gates … hair that will soon be enfolded into itself like a napkin at a banquet”. The scion of the Grand Duke and Duchess of the walled republic of Urbs-Ludus, his father is a great property developer with a passion for casinos and skyscrapers.

His parents decide this child of the internet needs his education extended beyond reality television in preparation for leading the Republic. His ignorance is remarkable, as his physician reports: “He has Tourette’s only without the Tourette’s’’, his vocabulary consisting of a single verbal tick — ‘‘f..k, nigger, c..t’’, his equivalent of generation Y’s ‘‘whatevs’’.

Fracassus’s tour of the Republics will be an opportunity to teach him about leadership. Visiting the Republic of Gnossia, he meets its leader, Vozzek Spravchick (think Vladimir Putin), a passionate sportsman with a special talent for toe-wrestling and corrupt business deals. The young prince learns that leadership requires conviction — the fraudster prevailing over the well-meaning liberal, the genuine liar acclaimed as trustworthy. At home, in the walled Republic, morality, intellectual honesty, saying what you mean and meaning what you say are obsolete niceties.

In due course the linguistically enfeebled Fracassus will discover Twitter, although stringing together the necessary characters proves taxing as an effective means of abusing his enemies. Fiction and reality elide as reality TV provides the prince with the requisite airtime for self-promotion.

This apprenticeship will serve him well as he prevails over the alternative, be-trousered and bespectacled female candidate (think Hillary Clinton). Her mistake is to burden viewers with “her mastery of argument and comprehensive grasp of affairs”.

Trump, like Fracassus, inherited wealth and power. Trump was groomed for the presidency by a father who exhorted his sons to be “killers and kings”. Trump Sr, like the Grand Duke, fleeced taxpayers by skimming the profits from Franklin Roosevelt’s postwar social housing projects. His son was tutored by the family lawyer, Roy Cohn, sinister amanuensis to the witch-hunting bullyboy turned prosecutor Joe McCarthy. Like Trump, Fracassus’s entry on politics is via the light entertainment business, which delights him with the discovery that winning is as easy as repeating “you’re fired”. His rise to power is inevitable.

Jacobson, thankfully, can’t resist an opportunity for comedy. But he is also a novelist of ideas and argument and opinion, which is why he is so deeply offended by Trump. Pussy is a warning about the perils of Trumpism: the contempt and suspicion of expertise, evidence, reflection, nuance, facts. At the toxic heart of the novel is a paradox: that Trump purports to be of The People, who feel (not think) he is one of them while ignoring his open contempt.

“Whatever was combative and divisive he liked; whatever was discursive and considered he didn’t, whatever demeaned amused him, whatever ennobled roused his ire.”

Swift wrote to Pope: “The chief end in my labours is to vex the world rather than divert it.” Satire is reactive, it is an expression of outrage, intended to discomfort the comfortable to mangle a truism. Pussy vexes, powerfully and persuasively. Because Jacobson is a writer besotted with language (and God save us from writers who are not), Pussy is an argument against the sloganeering we are subjected to — “lock her up”, “build a wall”, “America first” — in lieu of well-formulated and considered policy.

With all my heart, I hope Jacobson hasn’t written an elegy to language. However, he has indubitably written a superb paean to the power and importance of words for they carry ideas that demand more than 140 characters.

Louise Adler is chief executive of Melbourne University Publishing.

Pussy: A Novel

By Howard Jacobson

Jonathan Cape, 208pp, $29.99