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Perfection in a small space

Philip Hensher

Saturday, 21st October 2000

Tanner went over to the post office, where there was free pen and ink if you wanted it, and wrote a letter to his sister. But wait a minute, surely he couldn't read or write? Evidently by this point he could.

Like many of the best of Fitzgerald's writings, it leads a reader up the garden path before exploding harmlessly in the delicious bathos of a hugely complicated explanation:

There Tanner had made his one oversight. It wasn't the afterbirth, it was a second daughter, smaller, but a twin. But how come, if both of them were girls, that Mr Tanner himself still had the name of Tanner? Well, the Tanners went on to have nine more children, some of them boys, and one of those boys was Mr Tanner's father. And this was the point that Mr Tanner had been wanting to make all along - whereas the first daughter never got to be anything in particular, this second little girl grew up to be a lawyer with a firm in Wellington, and she did very well.

It is the most beautiful play with the reader's expectations, and, like people in real life, he is constantly getting things wrong before the narrative sets him right. This is a small book, probably not above 25,000 words, but a remarkably rich one. It sets the seal on a career we, as readers, can only count ourselves lucky to have lived through.

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