Glover’s Mistake by Nick Laird

10 Jul 2009

Glover’s Mistake

Nick Laird

Fourth Estate, Paperback, 247 page, ISBN: 978-0-00-719750-7, Price: £14.99

Yasmin Arshad

Nick Laird’s poetic talents are fully displayed in Glover’s Mistake. The new novel by the recent recipient of the prestigious Faber Award is much more than the slightly improbable love triangle it initially seems to be. Peppered with literary references, beautifully and brilliantly written, it captures the smells and sounds of contemporary London. The evening hour is described as ‘the hour when newspapers are ineptly refolded like road maps’ and abandoned on tubes, and ‘the smell of cumin and curry wafts’ across Hendon like heaven. Laird’s novel also philosophizes on the unknowable opacity of love ‘everyone you meet is wearing some disguise, and the lover is the best liar of the lot’.

The protagonist is David Pinner a thirty-five year old man who has not had sex or a relationship for years. He is overweight, bald and uncomfortably aware that he looks like an egg. Having dropped out of Goldsmiths, he has a dead-end job teaching literature to sixth form students at a school near Oxford Street and smokes reefers in the school bathroom. In his flat in Borough, he spends most of the time in his bedroom writing a cynical art blog called The Damp Review.

David is attracted to Ruth Marks, a professor he had at Goldsmiths who was once kind to him. Ruth, an American, has returned to London as an Artist in Residence at the Barbican. Glamorous, with an exotic sexual history, she is now an even more successful artist. At an exhibition, where her black canvas of the night sky sells for almost a million, David ingratiates himself and latches on to her and her arty set. After a few dinners, he is fantasizing about being with her and feeling successful at having put his hand on her back. It is a bitter disappointment to him when Ruth, far from reciprocating his feelings, ends up having a passionate affair with his flat-mate James Glover, a twenty-three year old barman. Glover is everything the misanthropic David is not-handsome, athletic, self- assured and an innocent.

The broken-hearted and jealous David feels increasingly humiliated by Ruth’s and James’ relationship and their subsequent treatment of him. As his resentment mounts, David goes from Everyman to Master-manipulator. Laird successfully shows the motivating power of personal jealousy, turning even a loser into an Iago-like force.

The only prominent flaw in this work is that Ruth’s love for James is not depicted with sufficient conviction. One can never quite believe in the brilliant Ruth’s devotion to the insipid James. However on the whole Laird does treats each of his characters with insight and sprinkles the novel with nuggets such as ‘if a wedding can be likened to a natural disaster, it’s the avalanche it has the most in common with’. His writing more than compensates for any weaknesses and lifts it into something far more interesting than another male angst novel. Glover’s Mistake is a witty work that is not only a fun read, but one in which every word is in its right place.