Double Fault (P.S. Series) Book

I am rubbish at rigid reading lists. Everything I read influences the next thing, in some way - even if that's often just to act as a contrast. This book had been languishing on the edge of my mighty bookshelf of unread possibilities since the week after I moved into my current flat, so that must have been April last year. But after the philosophy wallowing and unfamiliar narrative voice of The Elegance of the Hedgehog, it got bumped up the list. Lionel Shriver was what I really needed this week.

It's not a long book, but it took me almost a full week to read. Shriver seems to have a knack of writing main female characters I identify with hugely, in a voice that sounds like a more polished version of my inner monologue - and then spinning out their anxieties and flaws so that I end up examining mine more closely - and wondering how much I really do identify, after all. I wallow in her writing so luxuriously that I hardly notice when the plot constricts around my ribcage, right up until there's a loud crack from something vital.

In Double Fault, Willy, a gifted and very ambitious tennis player with a workaholic streak a mile wide and a tendency to conflate herself and her work, meets Eric, who is similar except for the last part. She's been playing tennis since she was five, and motivated and financed it entirely without support from her family; he started playing properly aged 18 and seems to live a charmed life, able to do anything he sets his mind to. They are fabulous together; they get married. And then, Eric starts getting better at his game, faster than Willy does - and her competitive side, her tenacious side, the side that measures her self-worth by how good she is at her work, that begins to strain. And a better study of characters I have not seen in a long time.

It's interesting to see what some authors have as recurring themes. This one is entirely obvious: Willy is the petty, self-conscious, un-self-aware precursor to Eva Khatchadourian. How to describe that as a theme? Ambitious women who are going to get blamed anyway? That's not right. Ambitious women whose fault it will be anyway? Shriver challenges my ideas of what fault looks like, for bad situations. Eric in Double Fault and Franklin in Kevin escape having fault attached to them, by some combination of not feeling the hurt so badly, not understanding how to empathise with Willy and Eva, blithely carrying on with what's important to them and somehow very subtly just not GETTING what's going on. Eric and Franklin are the innocents. Willy and Eva are the overthinkers, forced to look critically at their situation in a way that Eric and Franklin aren't, and it's that which leads to their downfall. I think Shriver's running theme is how difficult that is to articulate, and what a piss-awful situation it is to find yourself in when you then can't explain it or do anything useful to change it without breaking everything.

The other thing I want to say with regard to Kevin, is that this book was out of print for a few years til Lionel Shriver got what we might call her Wolf Hall moment and suddenly found her well-deserved writerly fame. This always makes me think, who else is there out there that will make me search my soul so hard, that I've never heard of because they've never had their international big break? I must take more recommendations; I must expand my horizons. I must do everything I can do not to miss things like this.