If you prick Ezra Levy, does he not bleed?

As a literary challenge, few tasks would be as bold or surprising as making one of your main characters a super-wealthy Jewish businessman. The sort who buy department stores and soccer teams. A man who knows his fellow Englishmen see him as a foreign presence trying to buy his way into authentic Englishness and thinks challenge accepted. Men of that type have been staples of English literature since at least Shakespeare, but tend not to much figure as leading men, let alone romantic ones.

Ezra Levy is not the protagonist of Emma Forrest’s spectacular new novel Father Figure, and only obliquely its love interest. He is a character in it whose life intertwines with that of Gail Susa, the teenage girl whose coming-of-age story we’re in. Gail, daughter of single mom Dar, is a London 16-year-old who due to some mix of courage and mental instability will hurl herself straight for important people who catch her attention. Dar, for her part, is a National Health Service nurse, 59 years old, who thinks the world of her brilliant daughter, but could stand to take better care of herself. Dar and Gail are brilliantly drawn characters out of 2020s literary fiction. More on them soon.

Ezra, though, is something more timeless. He’s a composite mogul, an Ashkenazi English Jew with biographical elements of Roman Abramovich or Rupert Murdoch or whichever other London-based billionaires. He has a young Polish trophy wife, the trophy being, as is spelled out, not just her good looks but the fact that her ancestors murdered his own. But he’s also a mensch, a man, a human male, in all his complexities.

And he is—in one of the book’s many moments of profound realism—weird about his Jewishness in this distinctly British way, as if, if he’s sufficiently discreet about it, not denying it but not flaunting it, he won’t encounter antisemitism. (You get this slightly more in Canada than the States, but not to quite the Ezra degree.) He’s awkward about his Jewishness, that is, until he isn’t.

Take a guess which country Ezra winds up moving to at the end of the book.

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But yes, Father Figure is a coming-of-age novel, and one about a clever girl on scholarship, at that. There’s a Substack post by the novelist A. Natasha Joukovsky that has been in the back of my mind while writing this review: “Every so often I see someone marveling at Irish novelistic prowess and I have to say it’s just not all that surprising to me. That proximity to power without its full personal benefits? Ireland is the ‘poor girl at boarding school’ of countries.’”

Indeed, Gail is in many ways a familiar type, recalling Lee Fiora from Curtis Sittenfeld’s 2005 novel Prep, not to mention the many examples, television and otherwise, on the TV Tropes website. She’s that one girl at the posh London girls’ school, St. Saviour’s, who is a bit........

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