Nick LairdRezensionen

I can see a lot of work went into the poems, but I didn’t get much from them. I don’t read much poetry, I’m happy to assume I just don’t have the knowledge to really appreciate this book.

On Kit's birthday, she receives a guinea pig.When Kit leaves for school, "the Surprise" is surrounded by her other pets: a dog, a cat, and a bird. Collectively, they decide she's an oddball, and the Surprise is sad. She tries to find ways to be like the others; she attaches balloons to herself so she can fly...and she flies right out the window. Luckily, Emily Brookstein catches her, cares for her, and returns her to Kit just in time. With new perspective, and a new name, Maud is accepted by the other pets, who soften their rigid schedule to allow for some new ideas.

Excellent endpapers show a sepia cross-section of an apartment building with its inhabitants (people and animals), plants, and decorations; different on front and back.

Charming.

See also: Alfie by Thyra Heder

Modern Gods (2017) by Nick Laird. This novel suffers from a split personality that left me feeling uncertain as to what the book was about. Was it an exploration of a dysfunctional Irish family? Was it a look into “Cargo” cults in and about Papua New Guinea (PNG)? Was it an examination of how religions battle over who has the “correct” path to eternal salvation? And as an added bonus, what was the opening scene of gun violence to do with the rest of the story?
We mainly focus on the The Donnelly family of Northern Ireland. There is something wrong with every one of them, and each of these wrongs colors the story. The seemingly most normal of the bunch is the father, Ken, who owns the family realty business and doesn’t seem to like anyone. Judith is the wife who has a growth enlarging within her that seems inoperable. The son is sleeping with his best friend’s wife while the younger daughter is getting ready for her second marriage. It is this event that pulls Liz, the eldest child, back from America where she just caught her live-in boyfriend sleeping with another man.
Almost two thirds of the novel centers about the complaints of this group, which are bad but not terrible, but things erupt the day after the wedding. It seems that the opening gun violence is directly aligned with the groom, automatically shifting the aspect of the novel.
And then it shifts again in the next chapter. Directly after the wedding, Liz is on her way to New Ulster in PNG, there to host a BBC documentary about the world’s newest religion. A lot happens in the days to come, Liz’s eyes are opened to new concepts, ideas are dashed and reconstructed and the reader is left to figure out many things by themselves.
What I drew from all this was, well I’m not certain. Was this story to be family troubles after the Troubles that plagued the North for so long. Or was this more about religion and how destructive it is. We have the missionaries working with the local government in an effort to destroy this new cult. We have Protestant vs. Catholic violence, even conflicts among the members of the family and the family against the community.
My bet is on the woes inflicted upon us all in the name of religion. My version of God is better than your version of the same God. Modern Gods appears to bean attempt to illustrate just how corruptive religion is and can be.
Well written with characters who live and breath, Modern Gods is a book that demands to be read more than once to find the depths of meaning it offers.

There's a few really excellent pieces in here. But lots that I couldn't connect with or understand at all.

Bought a UK edition at No Alibis bookstore in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

probably the best thing i've read this year

Had to get this through ILL, as it's only been published in the UK.

From the Introduction:
It's just a book of things we love, which we thought you might love, too. Its 'zoo-ness' consists in the variety and strangeness of the poems, and its newness in the apparently inexhaustible ability of those poems to surprise, delight, or shock us, no matter how many times we read them.
...
The title comes from Sylvia Plath's poem 'Child, included here...
The price of entry here is simply that the poem had to feel exceptional to us in some way...

Ground rules:
-agree on every poem
-no poets under 60 (recognizing that women and poets of color are a 'casualty' of this decision...roughly 1 in 4.5 poems in this anthology are written by women)

Poems are organized alphabetically by title (or first line, if no title). Index of poets and poems in back.

Poems
"Child" by Sylvia Plath, p. 52

"Epic" by Patrick Kavanagh, p. 101-102
"...Till Homer's ghost came whispering to my mind
He said: I made the Illiad from such
A local row. Gods make their own importance.

"Escape" by Elinor Wylie, p. 105
"But first I'll shrink to fairy size,
With a whisper no one understands,
Making blind moons of all your eyes,
And muddy roads of all your hands."

"Failing and Flying by Jack Gilbert, 109-110
"I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,
but just coming to the end of his triumph."

"Field Guide" by Tony Hoagland, p. 112
"...I mention this the same way
that I fold down the corner of a page
in certain library books,
so that the next reader will know
where to look for the good parts."

"Nostos" by Louise Gluck, p. 246
"We look at the world once, in childhood.
The rest is memory."

"The Sloth" by Theodore Roethke, p. 318
"In moving-slow he has no Peer.
You ask him something in his Ear,
He thinks about it for a Year..."

"Snow' by Louis MacNeice, p. 320
"World is crazier and more of it than we think..."

"The soul selects her own society" by Emily Dickinson, p. 334
"I've known her from an ample nation
Choose one;
Then close the valves of her attention
Like stone,"

"Special Orders" by Edward Hirsch, 224-225
"I don't understand this uncontainable grief.
Whatever you had that never fit,
whatever else you needed, believe me..."

"The Spoonbait" by Seamus Heaney, 335
"Glimpsed once and imagined for a lifetime...
Exit, alternatively, a toy of light,
Reeled through him upstream, snagging on nothing."

"There sat down, once, a thing on Henry's heart" by John Berryman, 355
"Nobody is ever missing."

"To His Coy Mistress" by Andrew Marvell, 368-369

"What my lips have kissed, and where, and why" by Edna St. Vincent Millay, 410
"...but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight..."

"Wolves" by Louis MacNeice, 425
"Come then all of you, come closer, form a circle,
Join hands and make believe that joined
Hands will keep away the wolves of water
Who howl along our coast. And be it assumed
That no one hears them among the talk and laughter.

Surprised at the absence of "The Second Coming" and "The Hollow Men" (though other Yeats poems are included).

This book is told in two intertwined stories: one in Ulster (Northern Ireland) and one in New Ulster (New Guinea). The first is the much better of the two is about a woman who discovers on her honeymoon that the man she married is a former terrorist. The latter is about her sister visiting a native religion / culture in New Guinea. The point seems to be that the creed of an "eye for an eye" is universal. To me the second story was not that interesting and has been told before. But clearly Laird is a talented writer.½

Nick Laird's third novel, and the first of his I've read, is the story of the Donnelly sisters, Liz and Alison. Liz is an academic who lives in New York but whose romantic life has stalled; she is returning home to Ballyglass in Northern Ireland for Alison's second wedding, to Stephen McLean, an apparently mild-mannered, stable, helpful sort (a relief, after her first, alcoholic husband). Stephen has told Alison he has a past, but she did not want to know details. The day after their wedding, the details come out on the front page of the Sunday Life: Stephen was one of the "Trick or Treat" killers, two masked men who went into a pub called the Day's End and killed five people during the Troubles - he was an early-release prisoner as a beneficiary of the Good Friday Agreement. At this point, the intertwined stories diverge: Alison goes on honeymoon with Stephen, still trying to sort out her feelings, and Liz flies off to New Ulster in Papua New Guinea with a tiny crew from the BBC to film a segment on a "cargo cult" led by a woman called Belef.

This is almost two books in one, the stories become so separate for much of the second half of the book. Both of the women are at crossroads in their lives, and also dealing with the aftereffects of their father Kenneth's stroke and the news that their mother Judith's cancer has returned. (Also, their little brother Spencer has been having an affair with his best friend's wife, who is also the assistant at their family real estate business.) Stephen and Alison's story is the morally thorny and therefore more interesting one, but Liz is the more compelling, curious character; I can imagine a book taking place entirely in Northern Ireland, with Liz, not Alison, married to Stephen - though Liz would have listened when he first wanted to tell her about his history.

Guardian review: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jul/08/modern-gods-nick-laird-fiction-rev...

Quotes

She wanted to sift her life through her fingers, to weigh the thing and not find it wanting. To find that everything was worth it in the end. (Judith, 26)

Home was like climbing into a suit that was made of your own body, and it looked like you, and it smelled like you, and it moved its hand when you told it to, but it wasn't you, not now. (Liz, 46)

Maybe everything led back to this exchange. Some small initial tilt in direction will cause, over time, a great distance to arise between the intended destination and the actual one. (Stephen, 48)

For how could you live here and not be sad? It was absurd: You didn't "believe" in something if you were born into it. You accepted it, you acquiesced, you submitted, you lost - and you gave up the chance to become yourself, to come to conclusions of your own. (Liz, 51)

What was wrong with her? Why did she always have to be right? (Liz, 126)

Of course he regretted it. His life, his whole life...But how could you draw a line between what he regretted for himself and what he regretted for others? (Stephen, 183)

"I don't see what the point is," he said eventually.
"I want to talk about it," Judith said quickly. "That's the point. Don't I get to talk about it if I want to?"
...
She had the sudden sense that in all their years together she had failed to get a single point across. If they dovetailed together, if they fitted, it was only because she had deformed and shaped herself out of all recognition. (Judith, 203)

Belef defied the surface of things. She resisted the men of the world....Belef offered her some clarification, some reply, some understanding of the world system as it really was beneath the sheen of its accepted and inequitable surface. (Liz, 208)

Writing quickly in a notebook is like whispering furiously into someone's ear; anyone else in the room assumes you're talking about them. (215)

Since then pain had come and done what pain does to a face. (232)

She was tired of being on her own. She didn't want to have to stop herself from walking into oblivion. Where was her partner? Why was she always alone? (Liz, 243)

Cities dealt exclusively in human time: working hours, last minute, the final call. But out here one encountered other kinds: insect time, bird time, grass time, fern time, the time it took a river to erode a hole in a rock so it looked like the seat of a tractor, the time it took a cloud to pass across the blue roof of a clearing... (259)

"And wanting something badly enough makes you see it everywhere. Religions involve mapping our desires onto objects." (Liz, 261)

Lying is work but righteous fury is so easy, can be slipped on like a coat. (Ian Hutchinson, 267)

She was there and here. Carrying the wounds of there and the weight of here. How small the body felt for what it had to hold; memory and experience and pain. How continually one must fold and trim the soul. (Liz, 298)

What divides us is nothing to what joins us. (Liz, 299)

This is not a book to read for entertainment, it’s one to read for education, for philosophical reasons.

If you have an emotional attachment to Ireland and its history, it’s a bloody painful one to get through.

The novel opens violent and bloody so the first impression you’re given is one of monsters especially with the Halloween theme placed over the scene and no explanation given for the massacre. Interspersed throughout the story you’ll suddenly come across a small story snuck in about one of the people who was part of that massacre then the main story picks up again so faces are put with the bodies from that horrific opening. Eventually an explanation is given late in the book as to who was involved and why.

One of the best lines is when a supporting character is trying to comfort another and tells her “I wish someone would explain Northern Ireland to me,” and the main character replied, “Me too.” That pretty much sums up the history and turbulence in which this story is set; no one, not even those who live there, can ever fully wrap their hearts and minds around it.

At its heart this is a story about the messiness of families, relationships and trying to navigate a world where boundaries don’t exist or move as fluid as water. Thrown in early, the author highlights the generational issue when it comes to dating that it seems increasingly newer generations of people are deciding at an exponential level that the ‘norms’ of dating mean to have sex with whoever is available regardless of gender and monogamous relationships exist only in history books; that could just be a thing in the States and not the rest of the world. The rules of motherhood were one of his better introspections on human behavior because any parent being honest with themselves would agree they made perfect sense.

At times he used the “f-word” so often I wondered if he had quota or if he was trying to create a drinking game – take a shot every time it appears. Since a good chunk of the story is set in Ireland he did at least use phrase and terminology appropriate for the country and people which is appreciated though I’m sure if Americans read this they’ll need to keep google open to understand what he means or we’ll be having reviewers claim Laird’s homophobic for using the word “fag” because they didn’t know that means “cigarette” in the UK. You shake your head but I’ve seen it.
The reader needs some kind of familiarity with what has happened, and on a smaller level continues to happen, in the North of Ireland to truly appreciate the story. Even small things will lose their humor if they don’t understand passages like when he describes his characters leaving County Derry and the context as to why the sign showing they’re leaving the area has been defaced. Or how another sign sums up so accurately the convoluted politics of the area and times: “In Texas murder gets you the electric chair. In Magherafelt you get chair of the council.”

For me the hardest part to read was when one of the characters tries to justify what he did by saying, “They were killing us for being Protestant, just for existing. We had to strike back.” I’m an Irish Catholic who lost family at the hands of Protestants simply because my family is Catholic. Our whole country was being run for hundreds of years by people who wanted to kill us, exterminate us, just for being Catholic; it was a genocide that England has never been punished for. Laws were created and enforced making everything about us illegal even into the late 1900s; so we began to fight back. It’s always been hard that for years, even now, they justified what they did and called us terrorists for fighting for our right to exist. All they had to do was let us live and treat us as equals and none of this would have happened.

As an Irish Catholic it was interesting reading the dynamics in an Irish Protestant family because if you didn’t know their religious leanings they very well could have been from the other side. Their struggles, their faith, their chaos and confusion with the politics of the area as well as how they feel regarding their own who use violence is exactly the same as us. When one of the characters is being interviewed for his part in killing innocent people just because they were Catholic he sounds so justified, even thrilled, I felt my soul break from the pain then fill with rage; it may be a fictional story but these kind of people and these events really happen and that’s where the emotional attachment hits thanks to Laird’s descriptive writing. It would have been easy to fall into old genetic patterns and just hold onto that hatred if Laird hadn’t shown that just as with Catholics there were Protestants who were truly good people who wanted nothing to do with the violence and maybe we needed to remember we can’t continue to judge and punish them for their religious beliefs if we want the same.

I only had two issues overall with the book. One was with the Part 2 of the story where one of the characters goes off to New Ulster to research a cult like group where Christians are painted as invaders destroying indigenous cultures (which they have) and are willing to cause death to spread their faith (something I’m not even going to touch). I didn’t really get why the author included this storyline as it didn’t seem to have anything to do with the bulk of the book unless it was just because the place she went to was called “New Ulster” like it was some kind of tie in to the Ulster in Ireland. Apparently the author just made that place up as I can’t find anywhere in Papua New Guinea called “New Ulster”. I guess you could stretch and say it was like a mirror to the Catholic-Protestant multi-centuries war in Ireland as you have an invading Christian faith bent on wiping out the existing people but whatever it still felt like it was 2 separate books meshed together and imperfectly at that.

The other issue I had was the bias towards Protestants being the innocent victims who were wrongly being murdered by Catholics. Although Laird did paint nearly all but one of his Protestant characters as having some humanity and not being pro-murder towards Catholics there was still never anyone pointing out WHY the violence and issues even existed; it’s not like Catholics just woke up one day and decided “Hey we’re bored let’s set off some bombs or shoot up people!” It’s a verifiable truth the history is a convoluted mess but you can’t explain anything or tell a story properly without showing both sides.

In Nick Laird’s new novel, Modern Gods, the politics of Northern Ireland runs parallel to that of Christian missionaries and an indigenous religious cult in New Ulster, Papua New Guinea. After a bad first marriage, Alison marries Stephen, only to later learn of his involvement as a member of the Irish Republican Army in a mass shooting. Her sister, Liz, also escaping a bad relationship, agrees to host a documentary for the BBC on the Story and its leader, Belef, and travels to Papua New Guinea, only to become enmeshed in the struggles there between the two religious factions. I found the alternating stories interesting, but the ending somewhat dissatisfying. Although describing her marriage, I do think Alison sums it up best. “A second marriage meant substituting old ceremonies and traditions with different ones, meant trading in the old gods for new, but Alison couldn’t help it; she didn’t believe in it any longer. She’d lost her faith and found the new gods were false gods.”

Read first 30 pages, wasn't drawn in.

Bought this at Politics & Prose on a trip to DC. I think To A Fault is still my favorite collection of his; Go Giants has a different feel (as did On Purpose), but is of equal quality (I think. It's easier to judge fiction than poetry). Favorite poems from this collection include the untitled frontispiece poem, "Cabochon," "Talking in Kitchens," "Special Effects," "Adeline," "Collusion," and "Grace and the Chilcot Inquiry."

Poetry, they're pretty sure you're not worth knowing,
fit for nothing, broken...
-frontispiece poem

You're winter sleep and I'm the bee dance.
-Epithalamium

...and we feel as we feel every day of the yer
like nobody knows how we feel and it's fine,
because our secrets live near the secrets of others...
Here it is written down if I forget to say it -
my home is a temple made by your hands.
-Talking in Kitchens

We'd wake to find the place
strange. Even some treeless
crossroads in the back end
of nowhere could, in a flash,
change: famous for a second,
then synonymous with loss.
-Collusion

- and when those other voices enter
it's like water meeting water
which forces open some new channel in
the mind -
-Progress (reliever)

In this somewhat jaded view of love and relationships today Nick Laird creates a less than admirable hero in the form of thirty two year old David Pinner, one time art student who changed course and now teaches English and aspires to be a writer. He shares his flat with James Glover, a twenty three year old church going bar-tender; and whereas James is fit and handsome David is beginning to got to seed. The two men enjoy an amicable relationship, that is until David introduces James to Ruth, an internationally successful artist and his former art tutor. While David harbours hopes of romance with Ruth, she takes an interest in James, and despite the twenty four year age gap, James and Ruth are soon dating, much to David's disgust. However all is not lost as far as David is concerned; he has plans.

Beautifully written this a a surprisingly amusing and alluring tale, surprisingly because the characters Laird expertly creates are riddle with personality faults. David is scheming and hypocritical, and displays no loyalty to his flat mate; Ruth is self-centred and while prepared to make a commitment she sees such as only temporary. Of the three James' probably fares best in the personality stakes, at least his failings can be put down to immaturity and inexperience, he is very much a victim of circumstances. But in this cynical insight into human nature who one sympathises with will depend very much on one's own values. Glover's Mistake is a very entertaining read, even though it may be a rather depressing indictment of the nature of human relationships.

simpatico, brillante e originale

David Pinner, the hero of Nick Laird's second novel, is the lowest of the low. Not a murderer, a rapist, a terrorist or even a Tom Hanks fan... he's a blogger. The scum!

David is a man consumed by insecurity, jealousy and that unsavoury combination of inferiority and superiority complexes that all true bloggers know so well. When he meets up with an old art school tutor who's gone on to bigger things, he sees romantic possibility (despite the fact that he's an unlovable slob - he's deluded, of course... didn't you hear, he's a blogger!?) But when the object of his affection meets and falls instead for David's flatmate Glover, there's nothing he won't do to put a spanner in the works and wreck their happiness.

Read the full review at my blog

This book follows the life of Danny Williams over a very hectic 5 day period set in London and the fictional town of Ballyglass in Northern Ireland. It all starts when old school friend Geordie turns up on his doorstep unexpectedly. He had to get away from some trouble back home in Northern Ireland so Danny agrees to let him stay for a while until he can sort something out. When he was young, Danny was known for wanting to do things the right way but he now works for a big city law firm where conscience is a four letter word (I wish it was then it would be easier to spell). He gets a reminder of it from beautiful young trainee Ellen, whom he's roped in to help on a due diligence he's been lumbered with, and starts to re-assess his priorities in life.

Written along the lines of a Nick Hornby story, though not as accomplished (but to be fair this is his first novel). It contains some fun characters and plenty of humour, often of the dark variety. I will certainly read another offering of Nick Laird's if and when it becomes available as I think this is a promising debut.

I am mildly surprised at some of the reviews here. Maybe I am weird after all. I found this book highly entertaining and I can identify completely with the way that the main character David lived his life as a complex of plotting and trying to maintain control and influence over those around him. This does happen - and in this case it is damnedly funny, heart-breaking and thought-provoking all at once. Almost like a Peep Show style novel this shows human relationships as they are. A highly recommended read!

After multiple attempts, I gave up on this book just passed half-way through. I sadly couldn't connect with or care about the characters. The first few chapters read like a short story, with an under-developed and shallow path. Usually I can muddle through but I didn't care enough to give the characters a chance to grow on me.

**Slight SPOILERS ahead**

Glover’s Mistake is the story of David Pinner who introduces Ruth Marks to his roommate, creating a love triangle that can only end in tears and a journey. David is a lonely English instructor who gloms onto anyone who shows him kindness; he’s been in something like love with Ruth for 13 years when, as his teacher in college, he mistakes her grace and friendliness (and indifference) as a vulnerability he can exploit to pitch his woo. He invites Ruth to his apartment for dinner and she and James Glover, the roommate, hit it off.

Ruth is a highly regarded feminist artist, beautiful and aging, and Glover is a handsome young man of 23 who recently lost his baby fat through exercise and isn’t quite sure what to do with the attention he is now getting. When Ruth and Glover develop a relationship, David is left out as the third wheel and loses his chance at wooing Ruth and his relationship with Glover, one of the few people he’s developed any sort of relationship with. As Glover and Ruth grow closer, David is driven underground in a sense- he does everything he can to wreck the romance through duplicity and sabotage, and spends most of his free time venting his spleen on art and love in his blog, The Damp Review. Since he doesn’t feel a part of the world, that he’s somehow unworthy and the world has done worse than rejecting him by ignoring him, he does what he can to knock the world down to what he sees as his level.

Laird draws his sketch of these three people in minute detail. There are several really beautiful descriptions, made all the more poignant because they cast a pale glow and the character’s foibles or foreshadow the despair that is coming like the terrible reveal in a nightmare. By the end of the book, even though none of the characters are particularly sympathetic, Laird forces us to empathize with Ruth and Glover because of the destruction David has brought into their lives. What starts out as a romantic comedy ends as Othello. Laird brings off the remarkable transformation because of his own skill at literary design, but he’s too generous a writer to leave us without at least a glimmer of hope that Ruth and Glover will get on with their lives and, with less of David in their lives, might stand a chance.

I recommend Glover’s Mistake, though it is heartbreaking.

Randal's mistake was wanting the flavor of Utterly Monkey again. Laird is undoubtedly a great writer, in plotting and pacing (weaker here) and motivation and flow on the individual page. But a book in which every major character is so completely self-deceived is not for me. Maybe you'll love it.½

I initially had a difficult time getting into Nick Laird's GLOVER"S MISTAKE. The characters were not richly drawn, nor were they sympathetic. The story is told from the point of view of a teacher who is cynical, rancorous and full of vitriolic rage, overweight, unhappy, and self-absorbed. If it weren't for Mr. Laird's superb writing and trenchant observations, I would have dropped the book entirely. But here is an example of the kind of brilliant observation that kept me going. The protagonist, David Pinner, goes home for Christmas, and here is how the author describes the plastic Christmas tree in David's parent's living room (p. 87):

"Since some of the branches had been slotted in wrongly to the metal trunk and were now stuck, it was bush-shaped rather than conical, and bare of decoration but for a single strand of silver tinsel that snaked around it and an angel David had made at school from yellowed card and pipe-cleaners, with a polystyrene ball for a head. The angel had had a cardboard wand once, and over the years Hilda had replaced it with a toothpick, a paperclip and now, rather ominously, a red-headed match."

I am glad I stayed with the book. Somewhere around page 120 a true novel gets going. In the first part of the story Mr. Laird is guilty of that English tendency to describe the surface of a character, and then to let that surface represent reality. (In Mr. Laird's own words, p. 127, "...these people, with their casual manners and ironic patter, their insinuation that surface was depth, that appearance was content.") Not only does the novel now supply a lot of the back-story of the characters, but the observations and musings themselves become richer, deeper. And what is mere description in the first part of the book, now becomes action and plot-points.

The writing remains wonderful. There is a passage where David lies in the bed of his flat-mate Glover. Glover had embarrassed and emotionally wounded David earlier, and this might be the "mistake" named in the book's title. It is after Glover's harsh words that David is spurred to become a devious Iago, manipulating situations to bring about Glover's fall from happiness to misery. Here is how Nick Laird describes it (p. 153):

"David smiled at himself in the wardrobe mirror, then sat down on the edge of the bed...Carefully he lowered himself down on to his back...So this was the view from here, from his bed, from his pillow. This is what it was like to be Glover...Here was his Artex ceiling, the cream paper globe of his lampshade. David turned his head to the right and here was his wall: magnolia, matt, bumpily plastered. To the left, here were his photographs, his books, his clothes; and here was something else, his smell...after he'd come back from the pub, under the smell of stale beer and ash there was a hint off him of forest, timber, sap. And now it came from his pillow. David inhaled again. Was Ruth's perfune in there? Some part per million of the atmosphere suggested her, a citrus sweetness."

I became absorbed in the second half of the book, a reaction in direct opposition to my feelings about the first half. It was still not possible to be sympathetic to David; but it is a testament to Mr. Laird's skill that one can understand David's actions, can see why the protagonist does what he does.

I suspect that time won't be kind to this novel. There are too many references to events and music and descriptions that won't have any resonance, even a generation from now. The book is very much of one time (2007) and one place (London). There will need to be a glossary, and notes in the back of future editions, to parse and explain a sentence like this one (p. 188): "Rolf was explaining to Glover why 35 mil is still way better than digital."

That aside, I still would recommend this novel to a reader who enjoys books on manners, morals and Society. There are so many fine descriptions and observations that it will benefit the reader to make their way to the second half of the book.

I liked this book more than Laird's previous work, Utterly Monkey, and often I found myself intrigued by the writing. Laird is able to derive emotion-laden imagery from the most commonplace parts of modern life and use it with devastating effect. I had two major problems with the book though. First, the title reveals too much. Second, the main character and narrator becomes too unlikeable too early, making it hard to maintain motivation through the remainder of the book.

Nick Laird is especially skilful at creating characters you can’t help but care about. “Glover’s Mistake” introduces us to David Pinner, a pathetic, lonely man, who has hopelessly positioned himself in an increasingly uncomfortable love triangle. A professor of English Literature, Pinner prefers to analyze and deconstruct society from afar, and regularly postulates about the meaninglessness of art, the unequivocal death of romance, and the impossibility of love.

Though Pinner often acts in ways that make you cringe, the very fact that his characters elicit such uncomfortable reactions speaks to Laird’s talent for creating a world that you can’t help but live in while reading this book. Recommended.½