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Love is in the air. Or, rather sex. The online Erotic Review is about to be relaunched as a physical magazine. And now here comes Howard Jacobson, our foremost Anglo-Jewish novelist and perhaps the closest we have to Philip Roth, with this decidedly kinky novel about the adulterous love affair and eventual marriage between a highly focused female TV producer, affectionately known as Miss Picky, and a somewhat more equivocal male playwright, aka an “arts-page celebrity”. She likes to tie up naked Etonians with Hermes scarves. Together they like to visit S and M clubs. Kerpow!, you might think. And Jacobson dispenses almost entirely with plot in his 17th novel, relying instead on the accumulative force of Lily and Sam’s aphoristic dialogue as their lives become ever more entwined. It’s not quite vintage Jacobson – he’s written better novels than this – but as his characters endlessly debate the meaning of love, he remains full of vim and insight. “I am nothing if not literary,” says Sam to Lily, and the quiet fear in the reader is that you could say the same here about Jacobson too.