“I was in a rage when I wrote it,” Howard Jacobson said of “Kalooki Nights” (Simon & Schuster, 450 pages, $26) on the eve of its publication in the United Kingdom. “This book,” he told Britain’s Observer, “is very angry at Jews.”

Do not get the wrong idea. Nothing so simple-minded, or, more important, po-faced as rage at the Jews could inform such a novel, whose narrator is a cartoonist with a cartoonist’s view of the world. Mr. Jacobson, a Jew from Manchester (Britain’s second largest Jewish community) is no self-hater. In his columns for the Independent, he dispassionately defends Israel and frequently expresses dismay at the way the left wing in Europe has become inextricable from virulent anti-Zionism.

Max Glickman grows up in the years after the Holocaust, in an unreligious family living (where else?) in a very Jewish neighborhood of Manchester called Crumpsall Park, where the Glickmans arrived a generation before from the Russian town of Novoropissik — “a nowhere place of piss and sick,” according to his father. Given the time and the place, Max could hardly have been anything but Jewishly aware of himself from the get-go. (He describes himself as a baby burbling “Jew Jew ” instead of “choo choo” on a train journey between Brighton and Liverpool).

A failed boxer, Max’s father spends his life trying to exert “a kind of muscular Zionism” on his family. Driven by a desire to reject the old traditions with all their dour, gruesome tragedy in favor of a rejuvenated, un-Jewish future, he forbids Max a Bar Mitzvah, preferring instead a boxing tussle in the garden as an induction into manhood. Later he encourages Max to go off and marry a gentile, the ultimate taboo. (Max does so — two anti-Semitic gentiles, no less). Meanwhile, Max’s beautiful mother has a consuming passion for kalooki, a card game that she plays every night, right through all but the High Holy Days.

With this background, it’s no surprise Max develops a taste — part curiosity, part repulsion, part envy — for a friendship with Manny Washinsky. Manny is the youngest member of a tremblingly pale, grossly unsocial Orthodox family that lives down the road: the joyless embodiment of everything Max’s father loathes about Jewishness. Whatever their differences, Manny and Max share a conviction that they are under constant threat from the non-Jewish world. Crouched in an air raid shelter, they pore over books such as “The Scourge of the Swastika” and trade horrible details about the SS, concentration camps, and even the sexual appetites for Jewish prisoners of the camp commandants’ wives. Together they plan an epic Jewish comic book called “Five Thousand Years of Suffering,” which Max completes (to little acclaim) long after he and Manny lose touch.

Years later — the year Max divorces his first anti-Semitic gentile wife — something shocking happens: The eternally pre-pubescent, Orthodox Manny gasses his parents to death and goes to prison.

It’s an inexplicable murder, but life goes on. Still more years later, after his second anti-Semitic gentile wife clears out, Max gets commissioned by a television producer to meet the recently released Manny. Max’s job is to get the incomprehensible out of him: Why did he do it? The answer is slow and fragmented in coming, always interrupted by other stories and threads and themes. Mr. Jacobson can be exasperatingly non-linear in his storytelling, but some kind of answer escapes at last. It lies somewhere between madness and a justifiable loathing of parents that used their impervious, exalted Jewishness to throttle, stifle, and ruin any chance of happiness for their children.

That Manny carries out a Holocaust-inspired murder (a fact we know from the start) is not to be seen as just retribution for all the pain caused by claustrophobic Jewish parenting. Mr. Jacobson does not conduct his business through grotesque moral inversions. But like that other student of Jewish neurosis, Philip Roth (with whom he is frequently and deservedly associated), he wants his readers to think deeply of discomfiting things. He makes it impossible to escape the sense of the fittingness (not the rightness) of Manny’s crime.

Ultimately, such intellectual discomfort seems more important to Mr. Jacobson than the details of the crime itself, and the book suffers for it. The exposé of the murder lacks conviction, its drastic perversity never quite squaring with Max’s retelling of Manny’s history. But taken amid the ambitious, splendid complexity of the whole, it would be hard not to forgive Mr Jacobson this single weakness.

Ms. Strimpel is on staff at the Times in London and writes for the Financial Times, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Jewish Chronicle.