" Oy!While I'm waiting for my chance to read "The Finkler Question" - this year's Man Booker winner, I thought I would acquaint myself with some of Jacobson's back list. If I thought parts of "The Making of Henry" were a bit of a slog, putting up with the tiresome neuroses a character perhaps overly concerned with the "Jewish angle" of his every social encounter...then "Kalooki Nights" is a virtual gauntlet-run over-the-top OCD OBSESSING about any conceivable Jewish angle about absolutely EVERYTHING. I heard Jacobson himself on NPR describing this book as Jew Jew Jew, joke joke joke, etc....and he is not exaggerating...except perhaps about the jokes. There are some funny passages, to be sure...and some interesting insights to the differences in culture and concerns among British Jews from Americans, but not enough levity, for my taste, to sustain 450 pages. Some reviewers have tried to label Jacobson as the English Phillip Roth, and to that he has said he prefers to be the Jewish Jane Austen. In Kalooki Nights Jacobson makes Roth at his most vulgar seem quaint - and, as for Jane Austen, well, I can't imagine her getting past the first page or two without suffering an aneurysm. Surely a comedy of manners should have - besides comedy (and there is some of that) - recognizable manners, and there are precious few of those to behold among the landsmen or the goyim in this book. "
— Milo, 2/10/2014