Life doesn’t care if your misery has a plot – but readers do

Sometimes writers have to get a memoir out of their system before they can start on their great novel. Will Boast spent years trying to turn his life story into fiction, but eventually gave up and wrote an autobiography. In Epilogue, he describes how his mother died of brain cancer when he was in his first year of college; two years later, his younger brother Rory was killed in a car crash, then his father set about drinking himself to death. Later, he discovered that his father had had two sons from a secret previous marriage, so he tracked them down and made friends. Boast certainly has plenty of material to work with, but this book feels like it’s been written more for himself than for his readers.

The characters remain shadowy, sketched in with brief vignettes and half-remembered dialogue. Whenever his English relations appear, they make a lot of cups of tea and talk exclusively about gardening and the weather. Boast adored his mother but he never quite conjures her up — we see her smoking in a doorway, stamping books in the local library, arguing with their father or reading a letter from home, but when she dies there’s no real sense of what he has lost. He does better with his father and brother, whose characters both seem to contribute to their deaths. Rory is rebellious, taking drugs and staying out late with his friends every night, while their father is hardworking and stoical. After Rory’s death, he drinks whisky long into the night and wishes his other son would come home from college. He eventually dies of a massive perforated ulcer that he’d left untreated for years.