He’s invited to accompany Michelle, who is now a celebrity, to the opening of a shoe shop on Rodeo Drive (‘It seemed like a new low to him.’) ‘Some sort of photosynthesis was taking place under the flashes of the cameras — she was growing visibly, in climbing towards the light.’
I won’t spoil the telling denouement, but as a result of it Toby has to leave L.A. ‘The further he got from L.A. the better he felt . . . Whether to return to Los Angeles or not became an irrelevance.’
Lambton is as good at beginnings as at endings. Could you resist reading on after this? ‘Jennifer was born with a silver spoon in her mouth which, upon her reaching adolescence, was ripped out with such force it nearly broke all her front teeth.’
I also enjoyed the opening of the story ‘Angels’, in which Tarquin Lamport, aged 52, moves from New York to L.A. with ‘all his carpets, New Age crystals, wind chimes, mandalas and paranoia’.
He had always lived cocooned in his genius. His implausibly high IQ made social interaction elusive. He couldn’t catch the subtitles of society’s dance.
On the jacket of the book Rupert Everett says a lot of nice and justified things about the stories, but one of the adjectives he applies is ‘eccentric’. That could be damning but is not, I think, fair. Occasionally Lambton takes off into sheer fantasy, as in the story whimsically titled ‘The Wind in the Willy’ about a small boy who insists on wearing nothing from the waist down, but is eventually treated to a mini-kilt from Mary Quant. But here fantasy is sustained throughout, as in a Thomas Love Peacock novel, so that we never need to suspend our suspension of disbelief. In other stories certainly Lambton writes about bizarre people; but she does so as a realist — they are bizarre people. We are told that a novel is on the way. It will be hard to wait patiently.
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