Jubb

C. L. Jubb is thirty-six, married, gainfully employed, and active in his community, both in local government and as a volunteer youth leader working with disadvantaged boys. But as he narrates the story of his downfall, we begin to see that he is other things as well: a voyeur, a fetishist, a racist, an admirer of Mussolini, and above all, a man obsessed by his sexual fantasies. With its unforgettable protagonist – odious yet pitiable, vile yet oddly sympathetic – Keith Waterhouse’s third novel is both a gripping case study of a social and sexual misfit and an unsettling but wickedly funny social satire.


Jubb (1963) was a departure from Waterhouse’s first two novels, the classic story of childhood There is a Happy Land and the comic masterpiece Billy Liar, but like those works it was widely acclaimed by critics, who compared it favorably with Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. This edition, the first in decades, features a new introduction by Alice Ferrebe and a reproduction of the original dust jacket art.


“Mr. Waterhouse’s feat is doubly admirable in that his central figure, C.L. Jubb, is about as soiled a figure – physically and spiritually – as a reader is likely to come across. Constantly and unsubtly lewd, a Peeping Tom, a fetishist, a collector of vulgar pornography, his escapades are demeaning, his actions unclean, his behavior repellent.... Mr. Waterhouse makes Jubb quite lucid in a deranged sort of way.... indeed a very funny book.” – New York Times


“What makes Jubb an important book and one of the finest in months, is that Waterhouse touches so close to the frightening center of Jubb’s humanness. It is indicative of Waterhouse’s skill that he can maintain humor in the face of the frightening aspect of a man inside-out. It is even more to his credit that he can turn a man inside-out to begin with ... a fascinating novel.” – Cleveland Plain Dealer


“It is not too much to say that the writing in Jubb is magnificent. There is scarcely a single false note, and the blending of the comic, the ridiculous, the pathetic, the human, and even the brave, is an achievement that puts Mr. Waterhouse above all his contemporary novelists.” – Washington D.C. Star


“Pathetic Jubb may be, but Mr. Waterhouse has somehow managed to make him a gloriously comic character.... Mr. Waterhouse’s criticism of our society is no less angry for being very funny, and he has achieved the remarkable feat of writing in the character of a man [who is psychopathic but] who nevertheless emerges as profoundly sane and even, in his own odd way, quite jolly.” – Times Literary Supplement


“Jubb, if this isn’t already immediately apparent, is a brilliantly funny book.... But its best quality is a generosity of imagination which banishes the stock image of the drab little fetishist and substitutes a desperate human being whom at one time or another we have all seen in the mirror.” – The Observer


“The greatest coup since Lolita ... Waterhouse, author of Billy Liar, demonstrates that there is enough erotic provocation in our midst to make voyeurs of us all.” – Saturday Review


“Waterhouse has few equals today for wry humor, laced with sin-and-tonic.” – London Evening News