By David Baddiel
Fourth Estate, £18.99
David Baddiel has already had a hugely successful career as a comedian - and indeed chart-topping song-writer with Frank Skinner and Ian Broudie for their 1996 football anthem, Three Lions. Since then, Baddiel - like Ben Elton before him - has moved from TV comedian to novelist. Now, further along this trajectory, he has produced a novel about a novelist.
Eli Gold is "the world's greatest living writer". He is a composite of Saul Bellow, Philip Roth and Arthur Koestler. Like Bellow, the elderly Gold is leaving behind his most recent wife and a very young child. Like Roth, he is a feisty American Jew, who likes writing about sex. Like Koestler, he had a controversial suicide pact with a much younger wife. (And, like Baddiel, he was born in Troy, in New York State).
As Gold lies dying in New York, we find out about his life from four characters: his precocious eight-year-old daughter, Colette; his anxious, unloved son, Harvey; a Mormon, on a mission to avenge his dead sister; and, across the Atlantic, Gold's first wife, Violet, now living in an old people's home in London.
