ANT015 - Small stages
Back from a new desk in sunny Bournemouth, we're focusing on novels that revolve around a tightly boxed area or time.
Note: You may have noticed A Novel Tribe has been on pause recently while I moved house. In the meantime, lots of new subscribers so welcome to you (and 👋 to fellow Dense Discovery readers!) We’re back to normal scheduling now. For the newcomers - that means a letter every 2 weeks, alternating between this original format and the looser, lighter offshoot ‘DogEars’ (ie: Ian McEwan on Music, an ode to changing seasons and architect Le Corbusier on Dreams that Become Young)
I recently moved from London to Bournemouth - a seaside town on England’s south coast in Dorset (the Jurassic Coast, to use its more intriguing moniker). I was both terrified and excited to move out of London, the place I’ve lived in and around all of my life and which, in it’s all consuming nature, is impossible to not let bleed into your identity. But I have felt as if the sea has been calling me for a long time now, the gentle tug of its tides felt in my body from afar, and I knew I would regret not answering it.
Beyond the slower pace of life, quiet roads, outdoorsy people and the constant presence of the sea - salt in the air, a blank horizon visible from just about anywhere, sand in every crevice - the main thing I’ve noticed is how the area I live in has become smaller. Not in a suffocating, claustrophobic, barely leave the house kind of way, but a relaxed, sauntering in the sun, waving to the neighbours lifestyle.
Up to now my life was spread around the city. Like most Londoners, I bounced around on tubes, busses and bikes to friends in its far corners and nightspots or restaurants opening in up and coming neighbourhoods. However wonderful the immediate surroundings, a thriving city means there is a constant lure of more, better, different somewhere else. Here there is a relaxed satisfaction. All within a fifteen minute walk, the beach is in one direction, the park and river in the other, a high street in the middle and friends nearby. I walk and occasionally cycle down tree lined roads, getting to know a smaller place in deeper detail, establishing routines and becoming familiar with people who’s own line up with them. Enjoying the calm rhythm of it and the feel of belonging that exists in an entirely different way to a bustling city.
I have written before of how the novels I am drawn to tend to subconsciously mirror my life in some way, so its no wonder that I have been visiting titles that have this similar contained feel to them. Much has been said about writing as an art of noticing and observing, and it is these books that do so in such delicious detail by focusing on a tiny area, a singular event or a short space of time. Rather than zooming out, as many great epics do, they magnify the every-day or delve under the layers of people and places to surface the currents underneath. Their stages are small but their ambition, emotion and impact is anything but.
“The true secret of happiness lies in taking a genuine interest in all the details of daily life.”
William Morris
Jodi Picoult’s A Spark of Light (2019) is a hard hitting, thought provoking exploration into human motives and how the context of our lives shapes our actions. Set from within a tense hostage situation - a lone gunman who has taken the staff and patients at an abortion clinic hostage - the events that led to this moment are told backwards with the present a constant taught wire. Jumping back in one hour increments, it is a thrilling, evocative depiction of a single day that never-the-less manages to encapsulate the lives of the gunman, his hostages and the police negotiator. Picoult’s view is nuanced, her prose sparkling and her ability to retain tension in this reverse narrative astounding.
We are all drowning slowly in the tide of our opinions, oblivious that we are taking on water every time we open our mouths.
Jodi Picoult - A Spark of Light
I’ve previously featured a passage from Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2006) in DOGEARS001, but as one of my favourite novels I’m happy to feature it more fully here. As the name implies, it tells the story of a single Saturday in the life of Henry Perowne, a brain surgeon and proud family man. When he has a minor car crash with a gangster who attempts to extort him, the day spirals to a dramatic climax. It is the more every-day moments in between - looking out on an early morning plane in the sky, the anticipation of a squash match, niggling debates with idealistic teenage children - that make the novel what it is. Constrained in time frame, it is also a joyful depiction of a local life full of small pleasures bought into focus through McEwan’s deftly woven meditations and meticulous detail.
When we go on about the big things, the political situation, global warming, world poverty, it all looks really terrible, with nothing getting better, nothing to look forward to. But when I think small, closer in-you know, a girl I've just met, or this song we're going to do with Chas, or snowboarding next month, then it looks great. So this is going to be my motto - think small.
Ian McEwan - Saturday
There is a physical contradiction in Orbital (2024) - Samantha Harvey’s photo-realistic depiction of a space shuttle orbiting the earth - that doesn’t go un-noticed amongst its thoughtful astronaut characters. The universe outside is mind-bending in its size, the most open space possible to venture into, yet they are contained within such a small place to live on top of each other in a shuttle that reduces time to well practiced dances around one another and meticulous routine. It is this tiny stage of space saving gadgets and the people in it that Harvey brings into technicolour detail for a depiction of space-travel that feels as if you are there, feeling the six sun-rises a day as they circle the earth. While she doesn’t shy away from looking out of the window to the depths that are impossible not to philosophise on, it is the worlds within that make this feel more like a factual account than fiction.
The earth, from here, is like heaven. It flows with colour. A burst of hopeful colour. When we’re on that planet we look up and think heaven is elsewhere, but here is what the astronauts and cosmonauts sometimes think: maybe all of us born to it have already died and are in an afterlife. If we must go to an improbable, hard-to-believe-in place when we die, that glassy, distant orb with its beautiful lonely light shows could well be it.
Samantha Harvey - Orbital
Stuck in a hospital bed after what should have been a routine operation, Elizabeth Strout’s My Name is Lucy Barton (2017), joins a woman looking out at the world from one of the smallest stages a human will experience. When her estranged mother visits, their casual chit-chat does little to hide the sadness of the past and frailty of their relationship. As she struggles to make sense of her life - the joys of the family she has created with her husband and the shadow of the family that created her - we are given an acutely refined view of a heartbreaking childhood, the woman it created and a delicately poised relationship between mother and daughter.
But I think I know so well the pain we children clutch to our chests, how it lasts our whole lifetime, with longings so large you can’t even weep. We hold it tight, we do, with each seizure of the beating heart: This is mine, this is mine, this is mine.
Elizabeth Strout - My Name is Lucy Barton
There is a concept in cooking that the right amount of salt feels like too much and not enough at the same time. It is this unbelievable balance, teetering into the impossible, that comes to mind as I read Jon McGregor’s If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things (2023). On one side of its tightrope walk is a sumptuously detailed portrait of a place and its people. On the other, an intriguing plot-line full of teases and sleight of hand building towards it’s eventual flourishing reveal. Both crank up their dials as McGregor gives us minutiae of a wide variety of lives and a tension of ‘what happened?’ right from the start that he seems to almost playfully flirt with revealing. Yet both ultimately leave me wanting them to keep going forever.
But here, as the dawn sneaks up on the last day of summer, and as a man with tired hands watches a young couple dance in the carpark of his restaurant, there are only these: sparkling eyes, smudged lipstick, fading starlight, the crunching of feet on gravel, laughter and a slow walk home.
Based around an every-day street in North England, short third-person passages give the book a fly on the wall feel as it flits between characters over a weekend. The street’s large houses are broken up into flats for a range of occupants - from students to immigrant families and elderly couples - which gives a breadth of individual experiences that contributes to a deep feel of the place. Cluttered and shabby but singing of life. McGregor’s ability to bring such a range of households into clarity and depth showcases astute observational powers and a genuine delight in his subjects that comes across on the page.
They haven't spoken about it, they haven't said what will we do when we leave here, do you want to come with me, let's work something out, and she knows that this means they will quickly and easily drift apart, into other people's lives, into other people's arms in rooms like this. She is surprised that this doesn't make her feel sad. She listens to the music, she looks around at the things people dropped when they fell asleep or went out of the room, she kisses the boy's arm again and she feels only a kind of sweet nostalgia. She wonders if you can feel nostalgic for something before it's in the past, she wonders if perhaps her vocabulary is too small or if her chemical intake has corroded it and the music goes doowah doowah doowah.
Interspersed between these third person passages is the books only first person narrator - a girl who we recognise as a periphery figure from the street, looking back from a slightly later time. It is from her that we learn something terrible happened and the plot gathers its tense momentum. It is also here that we gain a different angle not just on that street but on McGregor’s writing - a look at family and relationships from the feelings within our heads rather than the outside observed actions.
He says when your grandmother died your mother cried solidly for a week, solidly.
She was crying with relief he says, it was like as if a door had been unlocked and she'd been let outside, she said to me I'm safe now.
He waits, and he says this kid, when it's born, you mustn't ever let it think it's anything other than a gift and a blessing, do you hear me?
If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things is, in my eyes, a triumph. Stylistically singular and executed unbelievably. Both astoundingly clever and full of heart. I’m always trying to put my finger on how some writers can fly in the face of dogma around contemporary writing and brevity - eschewing it for long, poetry filled, joyous, hypnotic description - and McGregor provides a standout example if not an answer I can put my finger on. Perhaps the truth is simply that if you can do it well enough you can do anything.
“The whole city stopped - And this is a pause worth savouring, because the world will soon be complicated again.”
Jon McGregor - If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things
Mandy Brown on prioritising what we care about, delightfully wrapped up as A Unified Theory of Fucks.
This is one of my answers to the question of, why give a fuck about work? Why love your work? It won’t, of course, love you back. It can’t. Work isn’t a thing that can love. It isn’t alive, it isn’t and won’t ever be living. And my answer is: don’t. Don’t give a fuck about your work. Give all your fucks to the living. Give a fuck about the people you work with, and the people who receive your work—the people who use the tools and products and systems or, more often than not, are used by them. […] Give every last fuck you have to living things with beating hearts and breathing lungs and open eyes, with chloroplasts and mycelia and water-seeking roots, with wings and hands and leaves. Give like every fuck might be your last.
Prolific New Yorker contributor David Sedaris with a meditation on walking and deep friendship - How to Eat a Tire in a Year.
A convertible roared by, and we could briefly hear the music the driver was playing, a song that neither of us would ever voluntarily listen to. “That’s what my brother would do—put it off,” I told her. “Then, there’d be people who’d wait until the last minute and beg you to help them. It’s the Ant and the Grasshopper, when you really think about it, and, though I’m not proposing this, if you had to cull the population, I think this would be a pretty good way to do it. Those who eat their tire by the deadline stay. Those who put it off and make excuses die.
Enjoy and think on this transcription of a speech by John Gardner on Self Renewal and growing through life.
Not long ago, I read a splendid article on barnacles. I don't want to give the wrong impression of the focus of my reading interests. Sometimes days go by without my reading about barnacles, much less remembering what I read. But this article had an unforgettable opening paragraph. "The barnacle" the author explained "is confronted with an existential decision about where it's going to live. Once it decides.. . it spends the rest of its life with its head cemented to a rock.." End of quote. For a good many of us, it comes to that.
Shalom Auslander on Love as A Straight Jacket For Two (much more romantic than it sounds)
We laugh at the same things, we cry at the same things, we stand on the corner and shake our fists at the same things, we hear similar voices, we have similar scars. Our padded room is a double.
Down-tempo Oslo rapper Ivan Ave exemplifies this relaxed, local feeling with rhymes of the every-day that somehow take on greater significance. He puts pen to paper and mouth to microphone in a way that is completely distinct yet internationally relatable. Try this live performance of Hello, before moving onto Reaping, Walking Home, Circles, Honey Dip and then find your own routes down the rabbit hole of his seven albums.
I’m actively looking for guest contributors as in ANT001 and ANT004. If you’d like to contribute, just reply to this email. Alternatively the best thing you could do to help right now is to share it with someone you know. Simply forward this email or link them to the website.
Wherever you are, look closely and savour it.
MQ.