Howard Jacobson, whose new novel The Finkler Question is on the Booker longlist, is interviewed by Lindesay Irvine, for the Guardian’s books Review.

Invited to fulminate about his neglect by literary award-givers, Jacobson chooses instead to make a more general point about the comic novel. “The novel began as a comic form,” he says. “You’ve got Cervantes and Rabelais and they are wild. And while you can’t really say you want every novel to be comic thereafter, I kind of do, really. And if I don’t get it I feel a little cheated.”

Jacobson himself resisted for a long time his comic inclinations: “I was trying to write like Henry James. Novels were about country houses, for fuck’s sake.”

He has been compared to Philip Roth (same ethnic/communal background, same extravagant comic gifts, particularly in writing about sex, same anger), about which he is naturally delighted, though he is sad that Roth “thinks it’s all too grim now to be comic”.

The great test for a comic writer – not a humorist – he says, is the ability to “take it into the throat of grief. Can you make laughter and seriousness so close that they are the same thing?”