Coming From Behind was recommended to me by someone who, though I didn't know this until later, hadn't read the book. She had read a later book by the same author and found it funny. Maybe I'm not as subject to humour as some people (ie maybe I don't enjoy a joke as much as the next guy) but I found this book really irritating. It's about a professor at a polytechnic (those second-class universities they used to have in England until they abolished them but everyone still treats them as second class because the English don't let status markers be erased quite that easily). His life is terrible and depressing and he himself is terrible and depressing in his values and aspirations and his general state of being a schlub. So is everyone else in the book. It's that approach to comedy where it's funny because everything is blown up into hyperbole. And bad things happen but I don't care because a) it's inevitable that bad things happen in this kind of book, so I'm braced for it (I have a low tolerance, under regular circumstances, for bad news, even in fiction) and b) I dislike everyone involved.
It's is also extremely, but exceedingly, Jewy. He's obsessed with everything being about being Jewish. Maybe it's because he's British, where there's less of a tradition of writers writing about Jewiness. I don't love that kind of thing, being kind of an unjewy Jew myself, and in this case it became particularly irritating because it is subjected to the same hyperbolizing treatment as everything else, so that, for instance, the reason dude doesn't know what a flower is called is because he's Jewish.
Occasionally I found it funny, but mostly I just wanted to get to the end.
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