Nick Laird, Glover's Mistake

It's a strange thing to review novels while you're trying to write one. You sit at home pounding out the impossible and then you read a book that accomplishes those impossibilities, and makes it look easy. Writing novels = pain, but not for Nick Laird.

Something really amazing happened between his first book Utterly Monkey and now. This new book is really exciting, Glover's Mistake is...well, a real achievement for a writer who should be a bigger deal than he is. I don't know why this book is getting published in July, but that's life. It seems to me that Fall 2009, say...October, would be the best spot. But I guess everyone is afraid of Dan Brown.

I was very impressed with David, Laird's bitter creation, and the center of this grimy love triangle. From the very first page we're tossed around, going from one spot in David's mind to another and the first of many stellar lines:

"Money grants it's owners a kind of armour, and this crowd shone with it."

David is attending a art exhibition, and this event signals the start of a conversation about art and love, that David has with Ruth, and his roommate James for the rest of the novel. There is a low off-tune static to David, a kind of blistering hatred of everything mannered and wealthy, his manners are perfect, his actions are devious, and Laird follows the Mamet credo, "characters are defined by their actions."

Zoe Heller's latest also offers unlikeable characters, David is Laird's greatest concoction, and one that I was repulsed by and oddly drawn to. David is a teacher (as is Laird), and we witness his classroom antics, his hatred for his students, and ultimately his own self loathing. I think good, wholesome characters in modern novels are unrealistic, and hogwash. People are rude, nasty, self-centered and lonely. Why not examine them? If you don't like what you're reading maybe you should take a closer look at your own reflection.

Then there is Ruth. David loves her, but it's a strange love, she was his instructor many years earlier, and he's still smitten. Sadly, Ruth has taken a fancy to David's flatmate, James Glover, who isn't trying to out think anyone, nor is he capable if he did try. David is shocked with James and Ruth when they finally decide to make each other "honest", and spends the rest of the book finding delicate ways to eviscerate their bond.

Ruth is a world famous American artist who has come to London on what I would call a victory lap of the feminist ideal. It's a shame that she ran afoul of David, is it because her own intellectual curiosities don't appeal to him, or that she loves art for art's sake? David thinks she's trying to do more with her art than she's capable. She is aligning her work with an ideal and adopting those tenants, David sees her for what she is, but still desires her. Trouble being? Glover offers a decent shag and the unparalleled personality of a brick layer.

Laird writes David's simmering anger, I marked the moments that were the most thrilling, David has just put some toast in the toaster, "plunged two slices of white loaf into the toaster; watched the filaments buckle and redden with localized fury." This is a great example of someone who can't vocalize their anger. David is repressed, and Laird reveals with shining prose just how mad he is. There are moments when David writes his blog, especially page 183 of the galley I read, the last two paragraphs talk about sentimental love and romantic love, how a man goes for a greener pasture, and will ultimately be in the same spot he was in before he cheated. It's a brilliant moment, a sticky realization and a massive truth. Laird made David a hardened man, which is more real than any character ideal/arc you can dream up.

When we finally meet relatives of Ruth's that reflect David to himself, it's glorious, it shines and takes the whole book to another level. Glover's Mistake is a wonderful and savage discussion of love, art and mortality, which we all ignore, but hides in our own shadows. Nick Laird means business and this novel shows that like gravity he is to be respected.

-JR