If you wanted a brief epigraph for Linda Grant’s recent fiction, then five words from Dorothy Parker might well do the trick: ‘Time doth flit/ Oh shit.’ Certainly, there aren’t many writers who seem so astonished, even affronted, by life’s tendency (admittedly a strange one) to pass by more quickly than you ever imagined.
Her previous novel, We Had It So Good, followed a group of students from the Oxford of the late 1960s to the present day, where they were bewildered to find themselves in the unthinkable position of being quite old. Now her new one does the same with a group of students from the York of the early 1970s.
Inevitably, then, the two books do have similar themes, as youthful ideals come up against the annoyingly intractable world. The big difference, though, is that Upstairs at the Party is substantially gloomier. As the title implies, most of the characters in We Had It So Good did at least enjoy pretty enviable lives before the unexpected arrival of senescence. Here, almost nobody’s works out all that well. Grant is also a lot harsher on the youthful ideals themselves, depicting them not just as disappointingly unworkable, but as ridiculously childish. The York campus of the early 1970s is described as ‘a playpen’, where the central group ‘knew with the green force of teenage certainty, the driving fuse of insufferable self-confidence, that human weaknesses …were going to wither away.’
The trouble is that this emphasis, while bracing in itself, means that much of the best and most heartfelt writing comes in the first section. Grant’s evocations of the period are not always cliché-free: ‘Girls in Laura Ashley frocks let their long hair fall across their faces, and boys in loon pants and cheesecloth shirts wooed them with tightly rolled joints assembled on the back of Joni Mitchell albums.’ Yet on the whole, she serves up a rich and often alarming portrait of York university, where she herself studied (along with a left-wing firebrand called Peter Hitchens), at a time when its own doomed idealism could rival that of any adolescent.
Once the characters go their separate and somewhat random ways, however, the book treads water for a good while — until a handy alumni reunion brings everybody back to what’s now a highly successful commercial enterprise, where the staff are aghast to hear tales of their predecessors’ free-spirited negligence.
Clearly aware of the need for something to pull this together, Grant does give us a continuing mystery story about a girl who died at a student party back in 1973. But, for all the assertions that this death has haunted everybody ever since, it still feels somehow peripheral to Grant’s main concerns, and so essentially an author’s ruse to impose more narrative coherence than the book has earned. No wonder that, despite its moments of sharp social history and personal melancholy, Upstairs at the Party ends up seeming like a work in which Grant never quite manages to shape the material that really engages her (and us) — the long-lost world of 1970s student life — into a properly satisfying novel.
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