The Act of Love by Howard Jacobson

The narrator is Felix Quinn, an antiquarian bookseller who lives in Marylebone with his wife, Marisa. Felix tells us that, when Marisa was taken ill on their Florida honeymoon, he watched a doctor fondling her, and found himself a changed man. Since then, he's been obsessed with the idea of being a cuckold. It turns him on. Or rather, it doesn't just turn him on. It pretty much becomes his whole world.

One of the beauties of the book is the way Felix tries to explain his fetish. This is an eloquent 300-page argument in praise, if that's the right word, of masochism. Why does Felix want to be cuckolded? Perhaps he wants his wife to hurt him to get the hurting over with..

Perhaps the jealousy he feels when she does will be proof that he's capable of love. Maybe he needs the sting of loss to feel properly alive. Maybe (and this is getting into psychoanalytic territory) he needs to revisit feelings of dread again and again, to block out even worse feelings of dread.

Or, as Felix tells you the story of his life, another possibility emerges. People who have been hurt, he tells us, make better storytellers. People who do the hurting don't have much to tell.

So, using all the guile he can summon, Felix arranges for Marisa to have an affair with the louche Marius, the sort of bewhiskered man of leisure you might expect to find in an Edwardian novel. And having made the match, he haunts the couple, frantic with desire and primal fear.

As I say, lots of things are good about this novel. Marisa is beautifully observed. Naturally so — the observations come from an expert voyeur. Jacobson's disquisitions on the way men and women understand and misunderstand each other are particularly sharp. It's also very touching at the end. Is Felix really a masochist, though? Or is his tragedy that he's actually a sadist trying to pass himself off as a masochist? Read this, and decide for yourself..

Synopsis by Foyles.co.uk

Felix Quinn calls himself a happy man. He runs one of the oldest antiquarian bookshops in London and his wife, Marisa, is unfaithful to him. All husbands, Felix maintains, secretly want their wives to be unfaithful to them. Felix hasn't always thought this way. From the moment of his first boyhood rejection, surviving the shattering effects of love and jealousy had been the study of his life. But an event occurs while he is honeymooning with Marisa in Florida that changes all that. At a stroke he goes from dreading the thought of someone else's hands on the woman he loves to thinking about nothing else. From now on he is jealousy's slave and will know no peace until his wife betrays him, and then betrays him again. But how can it be called betrayal if it is what he wants?Enter Marius into Marisa's affections. And now Felix must wonder if he really is a happy man. This is a story about agony-addiction; but it is also about the nature of desire itself, the exquisiteness of loss, and the universality of the impulse - whether a jealous husband's or an avid reader's - to play the voyeur, to probe and question, to want to know, day after day, page after page, who is doing what to whom and what will happen next. Shocking, unashamedly perverse, mordantly funny, and at the last heartbreaking, "The Act of Love" tackles one of the last taboos of the erotic life. No husband who reads this novel will ever feel the same about his wife again. And no wife will be sure she really knows her husband.