Jacob's Advice: A Novel

My cousin, the well-known pharmacologist Larry Frost, always maintained his three favourite Americans were Jewish men: Bob Dylan, Saul Bellow and Woody Allen. Out of a nation of 300 million, it was this triumvirate with which he most identified.  ‘Of course,’ I counselled him, being older by seven years, ‘liking them doesn’t make you Jewish too.’  But he was convinced somewhere, deep down, he had to be.  There had to be a reason for his strong sense of empathy.  He loved the output of all three unreservedly, even the later, unfunny, unlistenable or unreadable works.  By some accident or mix-up in our family lineage, he insisted, there had to be a reason for his overwhelming feeling of consanguinity.  He was a philosemite extraordinaire, if not one of the Chosen People. Obsessed with the notion. Absolutely in thrall to it; which was, and is, his nature.  This conviction reached an apex of what I considered almost mystical grandeur and absurdity when he moved to Paris in the autumn of last year and found himself a Jewish girlfriend.  Ariel, almost twenty years his junior, and so pretty she broke men’s hearts at thirty paces as she approached them on the dust-blessed, pollen-laden Parisian streets. Where has she been all my life? they would ask their secret souls – me included, when I finally met her.  On the kind of sunny morning when the air still breathes Flaubert’s famous exhalations of ‘love and intelligence’, Ariel was unstoppable.  Her tiny, luminous mouse-face, with its languorous red gouge of a mouth, often peeking from under a beret clamped to a crown of shimmering black hair, was an engine of attraction.  Add to this a formidable mind and an even stronger will, and she was devastating. But I’m getting carried away . . . I must first let you meet Larry, and explain how and why I came to be living in Paris myself.     

I should establish straight away that we are both doctors, but of different kinds.  Larry to his new colleagues is Dr Lawrence Frost, a visiting neuropharmacologist at the Institut Pasteur on the rue de Vaugirard.  And I, to my students back home at Birkbeck, am Dr Newman – Nicholas Newman, a Research Fellow specialising in the History of Revolutionary France and the Napoleonic era.  I’ve published widely on the First Republic and the Jacobin cause, and was once asked to be historical advisor on a romantic comedy set at the time of the Terror – not much of either genre to be found there, I argued; so in the end I said no.  I’m only Nick to my closest friends (and Dad to my son, whom I won’t be seeing for a while now I’m resident here). Larry, by contrast, is Larry to everyone after a first encounter. He’s even Larry to the directrice-générale of the Institut.  He has that kind of effect on people.  In fact, I’ve always thought there was something Promethean about Larry – not in his suffering, I rarely see any of that, but in his daring; his intrepid, principled force.  Though nicely berthed at the Department of Neuroscience since October (and at the palatial Place des Vosges apartment of Ariel’s parents, no less), he has always held adversarial positions.  Against everything, it seems. A true contrarian. Ever since I’ve known him as a ‘grown-up’ he’s been something of a crusader against the monstrous $600bn pharmaceutical industry, with its shabby regulation, its market-driven misdemeanours, its academics sucking at the lucrative teat of the drugs manufacturers.  After graduating as a med doctor, followed by a stunning MSc in cellular function from King’s, Larry seems to have made a career from his Cassandra voice, penning articles everywhere from the BMJ to the broadsheets. Maybe I should revise ‘well-known’ pharmacologist to ‘notorious’. He’s a one-man revolution; a corrector of consciousnesses, and conscience.