What follows is a fascinating, shambling, often very funny meditation on failure, remorse, physical frailty, the fear of death and the fear of pretty much everything else, now you come to mention it. His cells are beginning to make mistakes. He worries about his awful teeth. Did he give up smoking in time? He knows he’s a hypochondriac, but he really feels unwell. Is he the only one who is falling apart, or is it the whole world?
My instinct here is to say that things should be fine, but they’re not, things should be fine, but we’re not happy, really not happy at all, when you think about the fact that we’re so incredibly comfortable it seems weird that we’re not happy, but our comfort comes at a price. There’s something murky and wrong about our way of life, something shifty and treacherous, and we can feel it, can’t we, and it’s beginning to tell, things are starting to give, things are starting to run out.
On the cover, Jon Ronson gives one of those my-mate-in-the-media pre-publication quotes we all crave: ‘Hilarious, touching and beautifully written ... Philip Larkin meets Jeremy Clarkson, but in a good way.’ Is there a good way? I can’t imagine any way in which William Leith’s honest questing could be likened to Clarkson’s bullying, knee-jerk certainty about everything. A better point of comparison might be Simon Gray’s diaries, whose stream of consciousness techniques Leith seems much influenced by. (Younger readers might just think he goes on a bit. Of course he does: he’s middle-aged.)
I am aware that this book won’t be to all tastes. More robust readers may feel he should stop fannying about and pull himself together. But beneath the artless prose and the all-too-familiar pain, there’s a very original mind working here, a mind that knows it’s entirely in thrall to its emotions. You can’t help hoping he will sort it all out eventually. Although if he did, he’d be faced with a new and even more intractable problem: what on earth to write about?
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