Hell in the suburbs
Andrew Barrow
FORTYSOMETHING by Nigel Williams Viking, £15.99, pp. 403 This novel, four hundred and some- thing pages long and compiled entirely of diary items, is a massive, unrelenting and occasionally overbearing compendium of original — and unoriginal — comic materi- al. It covers drugs, drink, mobile phones, midlife stress, career hiccups, parenthood and — oh dear, oh dear — loads of sex.
Sex, or rather the 49-year-old narrator's lack of it, features with appalling regularity in these pages and is often referred to by the word 'shagging' — surely the most heartless and heart-sinking term ever coined to describe the canoodling process?
So far, so bad; but I strongly suspect that the author of this extraordinarily forlorn tour de force knows all this and that the gloomy cumulative effect of all these jokes, all this cynicism, is fully intentional.
Certainly, this book provides the most lethal picture of suburban family life I have encountered. 'The way things are going at the moment,' notes our semi- househusband hero at one of his many despairing moments, 'I might as well be a woman.' And interwoven with these domestic delicacies are equally devastating pictures of the inner workings of the BBC. Here the diarist clings on as the unknown star of a radio soap and his long-drawn-out `death' and final 'reprieve' provide the story with an amusing but perhaps too obviously reflective subplot and extra dimension on the ageing process.
This may be so, but there are also subtle depths, or potholes, in this narrative, items of non-humorous reflection, genuine sweetness or plain talk which fit in oddly with the shallow and facetious quality of the whole: such as the touching moment, when the diarist takes time off from the mounting melodramas to sneak a look at his sleeping wife's face, 'unknowable, famil- iar, alien, cold, warm, sweet, sour, dazzling, dark'.
No, the problem for me lies partly in the great length and repetitiveness and partly in that so much comic stuff is pinned onto a character who is, as he admits himself, so terribly insubstantial. By the end, I had begun to feel as world-weary as the poor old narrator, so that the final rapproche- ment with his 'obscenely cheerful' and increasingly wayward wife seemed far too sentimental, far too self-centred, to be fully convincing: the telltale word 'I' features no less than 53 times in the last diary entry.
But, again, I wonder if this parody of the emotions, this mockery of sexual desire, isn't what this experienced author has planned all along. Certainly the name he has given his love-potion-obsessed hero, Slippery, confirms my suspicion that he was never intended to be anything more than absurdly `light on the carpet', to borrow what is supposedly the new BBC phrase for the homosexually inclined.
Anyway, the author's powers of observa- tion and grasp of modern vernacular are impressive and many of the jokes, whether satirical or surrealist, work wonderfully well. The diarist's continuous inability to spell his oldest son's name is a comic oddi- ty that gathers increasing momentum. So does the use of the real-life John Birt, name correctly spelt, as a walk-on charac- ter: 'a man with an almost superhuman grip on programme quality' who, unlike almost all the other male employees at Nigel Williams's BBC, has apparently no desire whatsoever to dress as a woman.
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