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Glover's Mistake
by Nick Laird
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"By the time you realize just what a dangerous writer Nick Laird is, it's too late to break away....Under his gaze, the quotidian events of domestic life seem irradiated with wit. But when the story starts racing to its wicked conclusion, Laird isn't kidding. He's posing a thoroughly modern moral challenge that can't be laughed off." Ron Charles, The Washington Post Book World (read the entire Washington Post Book World review)
Synopses & Reviews When David Pinner introduces his former teacher, the American artist Ruth Marks, to his friend and flatmate James Glover, he unwittingly sets in place a love triangle loaded with tension, guilt, and heartbreak. As David plays reluctant witness (and more) to James and Ruth's escalating love affair, he must come to terms with his own blighted emotional life.
Set in the London art scene awash with new money and intellectual pretension, in the sleek galleries and posh restaurants of a Britannia resurgent with cultural and economic power, Nick Laird's insightful and drolly satirical novel vividly portrays three people whose world gradually fractures along the ineluctable fault lines of desire, truth, deceit, and jealousy. With wit, compassion, and acuity, Laird explores the very nature of contemporary romance — "The Death of Love in Modern Culture" — as David puts it in one of his dyspeptic blog posts "among damaged souls whose hearts and heads never quite line up long enough for them to achieve true happiness." Review: By the time you realize just what a dangerous writer Nick Laird is, it's too late to break away. This new novel from Zadie Smith's husband comes on all wit and chumminess, a buddy story about two London roommates in love with the same woman. But in the familiar surroundings of romantic comedy, Laird is busy plotting something far more unsettling. "Glover's Mistake" turns imperceptibly toward the poisonous ... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) effects of bitterness, and it'll leave you feeling wary all day, as though you'd lain down with Nick Hornby and woken up beside Muriel Spark. The story opens at a posh art show, a multimedia exhibition of style and pretension that makes a ripe target for Laird's exquisite satire. With a few graceful lines, he sketches out a privileged world where "money grants its owners a kind of armour." The gallery's central piece is a giant sheet of black paper called "Night Sky (Ambiguous Heaven)," which sells for $950,000. But the real object of Laird's attention is a self-conscious young man from the opposite end of this social scale: David Pinner, a disaffected English teacher who feels intimidated even while seething with scorn. He's come to the gallery in hopes of reintroducing himself to Ruth Marks, a famous feminist artist "acclimatized to prosperity at an early age." She was a professor of his a dozen years ago, and the moment he sees her again, "he could imagine how she might unmoor a man's existence." With a bit of expertly tailored flattery, David manages to persuade Ruth to consider a collaborative art project, and during their subsequent meetings he fancies he might have a shot at a more romantic relationship. As alluring as Ruth is to David, David is equally seductive to us, though in a completely different way. Whereas she simmers with class (her charcoal scarf used to belong to Audrey Hepburn), he's a cynical curmudgeon who knows he's "growing old and odd ... falling prey to calcified and strange routines." An overweight misanthrope, unlucky in love, he pounds out his disappointments with films, television, restaurants and books on his blog, the Damp Review. He's the kind of underdog snob who appeals to our own buried resentments and unrecognized superiority with his deflating critiques of everything and everyone — particularly himself. His roommate, James Glover, couldn't be more different, and part of the fascination of this novel is how well Laird makes this odd couple work. At 23, Glover is arrestingly handsome, devoutly Christian and unabashedly optimistic. "While Glover wired plugs, changed fuses, replumbed the leaky washing machine, David made cups of tea and hovered." Nevertheless, "from the very start," Laird writes, "David felt they fitted; that they lived in the same collective noun. He wanted good things to happen to him. He wanted good things to happen to them both." Their friendship sparks with all the inside jokes and tolerated foibles of two guys who shouldn't get along but do. Neil Simon played with this situation 40 years ago, and though Laird is relying on some of the same comic tensions, he's updated the plot with more psychological acuity and given the relationship a darker tint. "A friendship," Laird writes, "is a kind of romance," and what follows is a sensitive look at the way straight men who enjoy each other's company nonetheless are torn by envy and wounded affection. At the very moment when David is about to make his move on Ruth, when "she gifted him the rare belief that he was special," she confesses an attraction to his roommate, Glover, and so begins a love triangle that moves from comedy to tragedy as subtly as twilight fades to night. We see all this from David's smoldering point of view, while he's consigned over the next six months to the role of a eunuch facilitating his roommate's relationship with a woman he imagined might be his own lover. "An aura of despair had settled over him like a pungent eau de cologne," Laird writes. With the kind of frantic bitterness that's both funny and a little scary, David realizes that he's been cast as Glover's "liege, his understudy, his ballboy and his footnote, his Sancho Panza, his Mercutio, there for service, nothing more." But despite this humiliation, David remains fixed at the center of their increasingly tense relationship, and he goes about sabotaging his best friend's happiness with a thousand tiny doses of suspicion and doubt, trying to be supportive and corrosive at the same time. Laird's attention to the pettiness of the wounded heart will make you wince. This is an asymmetrical battle between modern sophistication and old-fashioned faith, a conflict that inspires a rising sense of dread as David's ironic quips curdle into spite. Spying his friend's well-worn Bible next to the bed, David thinks, "There was something desperate and saddening about Glover sitting in here among his cricket almanacs and National Geographics, underlining mad and ancient rules to live by." But his own life, no matter how cerebral and worldly, makes a chilly counterpoint to Glover's simple faith. Laird's first two books were collections of poetry, and his lad-lit novels — this is his second, after "Utterly Monkey" (2006) — glide along with the language of a writer who can make every line work elegantly. Under his gaze, the quotidian events of domestic life seem irradiated with wit. But when the story starts racing to its wicked conclusion, Laird isn't kidding. He's posing a thoroughly modern moral challenge that can't be laughed off. You can follow Charles on Twitter at www.twitter.com/roncharles. Reviewed by Ron Charles, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
(hide most of this review)Review: "[A]ward-winning poet Laird has composed an unlikely group portrait with images and events moving at rapid speed, sometimes as blurred as the Tube rushing by." Library Journal Review: "Another sharply observed book by a very funny writer..." Kirkus Reviews Description: From a rising British novelist, an artful meditation on love and life in contemporary London. About the Author Nick Laird was born in 1975 in Northern Ireland. He was a scholar at Cambridge University, and later spent a year at Harvard University as a visiting fellow. The author of To a Fault, a poetry collection, he has received several prestigious awards for both poetry and fiction, including the 2005 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature.
Product Details
- ISBN:
- 9780670020973
- Author:
- Laird, Nick
- Publisher:
- Viking Books
- Subject:
- Literary
- Subject:
- Friendship
- Subject:
- Jealousy
- Subject:
- Psychological fiction
- Subject:
- London (england)
- Publication Date:
- July 2009
- Binding:
- Hardcover
- Language:
- English
- Pages:
- 247
- Dimensions:
- 9.20x6.20x1.00 in. 1.00 lbs.
- Age Level:
- 17-17
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