Unless: A Novel Book

Did I tell you I just clocked up a count of just over 500 novels read, according to my GR novels shelf? Hey, how about that. It must make me some kind of authority now. I can dish out advice, start up a helpline, I know which novel to attach to the St Bernard dog to take to the fallen climber in the Alps.

Except, I'm actually getting worse at picking novels to read. I just checked, and 13 out of 27 novels read so far this year have got a 1 or 2 star rating, i.e. I hated them & felt they were a blight on my life. Why is that?

Part of the problem is that when I find an author I like I never read anything else by them, it would be too obvious (recent exceptions : Edward St Aubyn and Jean Rhys). Also, I think I'm easily led by reviewer enthusiasm. This explains The Shock of the Fall, Gone Girl, Little Big and Her. But glorious reviews also led me to Life After Life, Animals and The Death of Bees, three recent books which delighted my very left ventricle.

You can't even rely on a novel's "classic" status, whatever that consists of. I Capture the Castle and The Man Who Loved Children turned out to be insufferable and worthy of forceful defenestration, but Lucky Jim, Where Angels Fear to Tread and The Talented Mr Ripley were all ripping good fun.

This present volume, Unless, winged its way to me garlanded with shortlists (2003 Booker & Orange) & dripping with critical fluids. But they were all wrong. It was dire.

A comfortable late 40s doctors' wife in Ontario has three lovely daughters. The eldest, 19 year old Norah, drops out of university to become a street person. Sits on the pavement in Toronto with a begging bowl holding a sign saying GOODNESS. This is not an uninteresting circumstance - Philip the Roth had a similar thing going on in American Pastoral. But it's not what you do, it's the way that you do it, and Carol Shields does a Lionel Shriver by mentioning the awful horror briefly then spending 100 plus pages maundering over every last possible detail of her comfortable middle-class-translating-wise-feminist-books-from-the-French-growing-old-gracefully-but-now-wondering-what-the-point-of-it-all-is-cutesy-artsy Canadian life. After p 120 I knew what the daughter was up to. The front of her sign said GOODNESS but the back said ME, MOTHER, PUT A SOCK IN IT.