Good news for comic novelists everywhere: The finest living comic novelist in English, Howard Jacobson, has won the Man Booker Prize, at age 68, for his novel The Finkler Question. This coming hard on the heels of the Nobel going to much-deserving Mario Vargas Llosa means we've had a bumper crop of deserving writers being honored, for a change. But even more important, to a comic novelist such as your humble servant, is the possibility that, with the imprimatur of the Man Booker--and people always need imprimaturs to know what's up and what's down, don't they?--literary comedy might be seen not as frivolity but as what it is, a humorous way of being serious, a response to life's absurdities. I've never been able to enjoy reading novels that don't have an element of the absurd in them, and I certainly couldn't write one; it's God's way, it should be Man's way, too. Jacobson understands this, as he says in this essay.

I'll raise a glass tonight to Jacobson and his art, and to all who aspire to make the novel, in the words of D. H. Lawrence (a remarkably humorless novelist,now that I think of it) the "bright book of life"--including a few laughs.