Make or break?

My husband started reading Diana Evans’s third novel, Ordinary People, the day after I’d finished it. Three days later, I asked him how he was getting on. He said: ‘I’ve just got to the knifing.’ I said: ‘What knifing?’

I’d already forgotten about the knifing. A whole knifing in south London, complete with innocent dead boy and devastated mother. The incident’s strange forgettableness was a sign of the flaws of a novel so nearly very good, and admirable in many ways. It’s sprawling (like the suburbs of south London in which it’s set), and many of its extended scenes, though beautifully and richly imagined, lack the vital element of plot-forwarding relevance that would make them memorable.

The author is black and so are three of her four main characters (Michael and Melissa, and Damian and Stephanie, two discontented couples). They listen to throbbing music all the time, in the house or on their headphones on the bus, and Evans always tells us which song it is. There’s a playlist on her website to go with the novel. I’ve listened, and it made me feel old and white, but that’s fine.

You live inside these characters’ thoughts for more than 300 pages. The big question of the book is ‘will the couples start being nice and in love again, or is there no hope?’ I still cared half-way through, but by the end, when Michael and Melissa in particular had gone off and on and then off each other again, I did think the hackneyed thought I’ve seen on a ‘Keep calm and carry on’ spin-off mug: ‘Shut up and deal with it.’ Oh, do stop over-examining your relationships and fretting about your bodies’ ‘rightness’ and ‘balance’, please.