What's in a Name? A Masterpiece! 
 It is the names you notice first: Ailinn Solomons, Kevern Cohen, Densdell Kroplik, Breoc Heilbron, Eoghan Rosenthal, and of course the vicar, Golvan Shlagman. All the inhabitants in Port Reuben (formerly Ludgvennock) combine Jewish surnames with Celtic or Anglo-Saxon given names. Odd, to say the least. Howard Jacobson is utterly masterly in the control he shows in this extraordinary novel. To this and other questions, he gives the answers only very slowly, but he deals less in revelations than a softly proliferating tissue of suggestion. The finest tendrils merely, the associations of a word or phrase, set off occasionally by the buried detonations of some sudden shock. This is a gossamer book, a gentle comedy that seduces its readers even as it lays the heaviest moral weight upon our shoulders. 
 [Stop reading here if you want to let Jacobson tell things in his own way. I shall try to add a little more with each paragraph, though avoiding actual plot spoilers. If you read on, feel free to stop at any time.] 
 It soon becomes clear that we are in a dystopian world. Post-apocalyptic, actually, though everybody is too polite to mention what the apocalypse was; all they say, always in capitals, is WHAT HAPPENED, IF IT HAPPENED. Some generations ago, clearly. And whatever is was, it also involved the collapse of the banking system and many of the mechanisms of government. If this is an Orwellian world, it is a gentle one, based upon willing compliance rather than enforcement. The phones make only local calls. The radio programs a steady diet of ballads and love songs. People believe in loving their neighbors and always saying sorry, though there are occasional outbursts of murder and sexual violence. Kevern (pronounced "key-vern") Cohen lives in a clifftop cottage and carves wooden lovespoons for tourists; Ailinn Solomons, his girlfriend, makes paper flowers. Among other things, this is a love story. 
 The J of the title is not the normal letter, but a J with two bars across it, a J that is censored or half-erased. Kevern's father would always put two fingers to his mouth, like a hand holding a non-existent cigarette, whenever a word beginning with J passed his lips, and Kevern does the same. Not that the real J-word is ever mentioned, not once. Those people simply do not exist any more; only through folklore do we know what they looked like, or how they behaved. You could look it up, of course, but the use of reference libraries is discouraged, and anyway most of the books have pages missing. 
 J was short-listed for the 2014 Man Booker Prize, and would probably have won if Richard Flanagan's 
 The Narrow Road to the Deep North 
 had not been at least equally extraordinary. Jacobson's The Finkler Question, which did win in 2010, shows him to be deeply concerned with Jewish matters: whether historically, or the place of Jews in society today, or the future of the state of Israel. But he approaches these topics in offbeat ways, as a humorist, avoiding the obvious hot buttons, and often viewing his people through the eyes of Gentiles. The leading character in Finkler, for example, is envious of Jews and wishes to become one; the most blatant pieces of anti-Semitism in that book come from the mouths of Jews themselves. 
 Although references to the Holocaust creep with increasing frequency into the present novel, Jacobson is very careful not to tuck it away in a specific place in time. It is not long-dead Germans in the 1940s he is indicting, but all of us. "We have been lulled by the great autocrat-driven genocides of the recent past into thinking that nothing of that enormity of madness can ever happen again -- not anywhere, least of all here." So, with chilling prescience, writes one of the disappeared. In Jacobson's world, "It can't happen here" has morphed into "It did happen here... or did it?" This is a society that accepts (more or less) its culpability, and tries to ensure (more or less) that it will never happen again. A society that has Made Amends. Dystopian or not, it is a society basking in the same smug complacency we see today. Reading Jacobson's novel, we smile with amused recognition--yet his implications are chilling. 
 In the last section of the novel, we learn of a project of restitution. Good, right? You find some surviving Jews and encourage them to build a community again. Yet the reason for it? Because people are happier having someone to hate.