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Summary
Summary
In this Booker Prize-nominated "dream of a novel," ordinary middle-class lives converge and collide one summer day in England (The Times).
In delicate, intricately observed close-up, this novel makes us privy to the private lives of residents of a quiet street over the course of a single day.
If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things explores the hopes, fears, and unspoken despairs of a diverse community: a single father with painfully scarred hands; a group of young club-goers just home from an all-night rave, sweetly high and mulling over vague dreams; and the nervous young man at number 18 who collects weird urban junk and is haunted by the specter of unrequited love. What eventually unites them is an utterly surprising and terrible twist of fate that shatters their everyday, ordinary tranquility, and all that they take for granted.
A prose poem of a novel with a mystery at its center that "recalls To The Lighthouse or Mrs. Dalloway" (The Times), If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things was the recipient of the Somerset Maugham Award and the Betty Trask Award, and was named one of the best books of the year by the Los Angeles Times. It is, in the words of Ali Smith, "a tremendous read."
"A wonderful evocation of the beauty and horror of the literally everyday." -- Booklist, starred review
"Absolutely resplendent . . . does for urban England what John Cheever did for Westchester County." -- Bookpage
Author Notes
Jon McGregor published his first novel in Britain in 2002 to critical acclaim, and was inspired in part by the phenomenal media attention that surrounded the death of Princess Diana. He has written numerous short stories leading, in part, to the development of some of his novels. He founded the Nottingham Writer's Studio in 2006 and also taught a course at Arvon. McGregor lives in Nottingham, England.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
McGregor's poignant, Booker-nominated debut examines in loving detail a day in the lives of the inhabitants of a single British block. It is a day like any other-a woman prepares breakfast for her family, boys play cricket, a man washes his car-until a terrible accident occurs, which is witnessed by all the neighbors but concealed from readers until the novel's end. Drifting from apartment to house to yard, McGregor reveals the stories found in each: there is the couple who fight bitterly and have brilliant sex; the man with hands scarred from trying, unsuccessfully, to save his wife from a fire; the aging veteran keeping from his wife the truth of his imminent demise. Weaving through these tales of the transcendental ordinary is the first-person narrative of a girl coming to terms with her unexpected pregnancy after a one-night stand. Her lover's twin brother arrives to drive her to her parents, but doesn't tell her the truth about his brother's absence; the girl's mother has her own secrets. McGregor's rapt attention to the exquisiteness of daily life sometimes makes his details ring falsely portentous, and his unwavering focus on minutiae-rain, traffic lights-can be wearying. But as the man with the scarred hands remarks, "there are many things you could miss if you are not paying careful attention. There are remarkable things all the time." This is the guiding principle of McGregor's novel, one that requires patience but yields ample rewards. (Nov. 4) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Nominated for the Booker Prize, this first novel has two narratives: first, there's the story of a single day in the lives of the residents of one street somewhere in England, from an old man struggling to tell his wife that he is dying to an eccentric young man who collects errata from the street and burns with unrequited love for one of his neighbors. The second story follows the aforementioned beloved young woman years later, after she learns she is pregnant. From the beginning, it's obvious that an accident happened on the street toward the end of the day, but we don't actually see the accident until near the end, and the two stories each inch closer to the moment. McGregor creates characters that brim with life and substance through exquisitely detailed descriptions of their lives and memories. But remarkably, almost no one has a name. Instead, the characters are known by their traits (the man with the burnt hands, the boy with the yellow sunglasses ), exposing both the disconnection and the unspoken intimacy between neighbors. A wonderful evocation of the beauty and horror of the literally everyday. --John Green Copyright 2003 Booklist
Guardian Review
About a quarter of the way through Jon McGregor's first novel - a surprise inclusion on the Booker longlist this week - an elderly, working-class man racked with lung cancer laughs and then "clutches at his throat, head tipped back, mouth gaping, silent, staring at the ceiling like a tourist in the Sistine Chapel". If the alarm bells haven't already rung countless times, then they certainly do at that sudden, gratuitous lurch into the world of art history. This is a novel where the contrived metaphor, the struggling simile, the romantic reference all come first. Here is a nameless urban contemporary street on "the last day of summer". It's a day when the many residents - few of them identified by more than house number or hair colour - experience a terrible, violent, communal event. What is it? You will have to wait till the final pages to find out. Meanwhile, McGregor's doom-laden narrative - told mostly by an omniscient (and well-travelled and cultured) narrator - is punctured now and then by the separate voice of a girl who, after an impulsive one-night stand in Scotland, is pregnant. This girl spends a lot of time woefully contemplating the fluttery feeling in her belly - how you long to point her in the direction of a Marie Stopes - and feeling alone. Finally she receives a mysterious visit from a young man whose twin brother (who lives on that street on that last day of summer) fosters a secret love for her. I know I ought just to go with the flow. This is a clean, bare, sensitive and undoubtedly well-intentioned piece of fiction by someone still in his 20s. It's admirably adventurous. Its determinedly unpunctuated dialogue more or less works. And I know what McGregor is aiming for - how he wants to create 360 o pans with his juddery word-camera and show us what's going on in a whole neighbourhood. How stuff that seems small and insignificant can have huge consequences. How the whole darn street can be buzzing with life, yet people are still pregnant and dying and lonely and alone. But the trouble with largeness, with this wide lens, is that it can be oddly ungripping, colourless, unfocused. And focus, at the end of the day, is what makes us turn the page. So here, though we can see the whole street, we can't believe in any of its backdrop people, these stuck-on fuzzy-felt figures. And their comings and goings are hardly enlivened by being compared to soppy things like "wool on a loom" or "figures in a Pompeii exhibition". There's a fatal lack of humour, but even worse is the way the narrative voice pompously tells you what the characters feel in language they'd never use. Though these people seem to be a careful racial and social mix, their preoccupations are still conveniently English Whimsical. How would it be, wonders the boy with the pierced eyebrow, "to know your own existence is a miracle?" Yes, this is a novel about how our lives are "paler and poorer" if we don't see "remarkable" things for what they are. And yes, it's a good and true idea. But, though you couldn't say this is a poor novel (there's a writerly energy here that suggests McGregor will go far), it would be hard to imagine a paler one, its lifeblood sucked out by a Virginia Woolfish adherence to the fey, the pretend, the fortuitously elegant. Julie Myerson's most recent novel is Laura Blundy (Fourth Estate). To order If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things for pounds 10.99 plus p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 066 7979. s Caption: article-remarkable.1 I know I ought just to go with the flow. This is a clean, bare, sensitive and undoubtedly well-intentioned piece of fiction by someone still in his 20s. It's admirably adventurous. Its determinedly unpunctuated dialogue more or less works. And I know what [Jon McGregor] is aiming for - how he wants to create 360 o pans with his juddery word-camera and show us what's going on in a whole neighbourhood. How stuff that seems small and insignificant can have huge consequences. How the whole darn street can be buzzing with life, yet people are still pregnant and dying and lonely and alone. Yes, this is a novel about how our lives are "paler and poorer" if we don't see "remarkable" things for what they are. And yes, it's a good and true idea. But, though you couldn't say this is a poor novel (there's a writerly energy here that suggests McGregor will go far), it would be hard to imagine a paler one, its lifeblood sucked out by a Virginia Woolfish adherence to the fey, the pretend, the fortuitously elegant. - Julie Myerson.
Kirkus Review
A prizewinning first novel from England is an impressionist portrait of neighbors on one city block. Listen, coos the narrator, listen, with a faint echo, at the start, of Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood. Thomas was evoking a Welsh village, while McGregor is summoning the nightsounds of an English city. It's summertime. There's a street of row houses. Neighbors are running errands, hanging out, doing chores. Then something terrible happens, and the neighbors share the horror, transfixed; the event is not described until the end. Small kids improvise a cricket game with a milk crate; older hip kids return from all-night clubbing to smoke weed. A lonely archaeology student collects sidewalk odds and ends ("urban archiving"). A man with ruined hands listens respectfully to his daughter's visions of angels. An old couple step out jauntily to celebrate their 55th anniversary. With the neighbors as a backdrop, the spotlight turns to a character we'll call The Girl. She's just learned she is pregnant, the result of a marvelous one-night-stand in Scotland. She met the student only once, too, at a party, when she was high; they arranged a date that she forgot, though the student never forgot her. His twin brother shows up and drives The Girl to her parents. As she reveals the secret of her pregnancy, she learns her mother's own well-kept secret. Secrets are legion on the block. The old man has not told his wife he's terminally ill, and Michael has yet to tell The Girl the secret of his brother's disappearance. Delicate little clues tell us that some of the neighbors are from the subcontinent, but color and ethnicity aren't important here; the "remarkable things" of the title are the small moments of the here-and-now that rival angelic visions. Those are what McGregor is celebrating. The halting conversations are overdone, and that street horror is problematic, but 26-year-old McGregor's sharp eye and broad sympathies show a true novelistic sensibility and a sizable talent. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Excerpts
Excerpts
If you listen, you can hear it. The city, it sings. If you stand quietly, at the foot of a garden, in the middle of a street, on the roof of a house. It's clearest at night, when the sound cuts more sharply across the surface of things, when the song reaches out to a place inside you. It's a wordless song, for the most, but it's a song all the same, and nobody hearing it could doubt what it sings. And the song sings the loudest when you pick out each note. The low soothing hum of air-conditioners, fanning out the heat and the smells of shops and cafes and offices across the city, winding up and winding down, long breaths layered upon each other, a lullaby hum for tired streets. The rush of traffic still cutting across flyovers, even in the dark hours a constant crush of sound, tyres rolling across tarmac and engines rumbling, loose drains and manhole covers clack-clacking like cast-iron castanets. Road-menders mending, choosing the hours of least interruption, rupturing the cold night air with drills and jack-hammers and pneumatic pumps, hard- sweating beneath the fizzing hiss of floodlights, shouting to each other like drummers in rock bands calling out rhythms, pasting new skin on the veins of the city. Restless machines in workshops and factories with endless shifts, turning and pumping and steaming and sparking, pressing and rolling and weaving and printing, the hard crash and ring and clatter lifting out of echo-high buildings and sifting into the night, an unaudited product beside the paper and cloth and steel and bread, the packed and the bound and the made. Lorries reversing, right round the arc of industrial parks, it seems every lorry in town is reversing, backing through gateways, easing up ramps, shrill- calling their presence while forklift trucks gas and prang around them, heaping and stacking and loading. And all the alarms, calling for help, each district and quarter, each street and estate, each every way you turn has alarms going off, coming on, going off, coming on, a hammered ring like a lightning drum-roll, like a mesmeric bell- toll, the false and the real as loud as each other, crying their needs to the night like an understaffed orphanage, babies waawaa-ing in darkened wards. Sung sirens, sliding through the streets, streaking blue light from distress to distress, the slow wail weaving urgency through the darkest of the dark hours, a lament lifted high, held above the rooftops and fading away, lifted high, flashing past, fading away. And all these things sing constant, the machines and the sirens, the cars blurting hey and rumbling all headlong, the hoots and the shouts and the hums and the crackles, all come together and rouse like a choir, sinking and rising with the turn of the wind, the counter and solo, the harmony humming expecting more voices. So listen. Listen, and there is more to hear. The rattle of a dustbin lid knocked to the floor. The scrawl and scratch of two hackle-raised cats. The sudden thundercrash of bottles emptied into crates. The slam-slam of car doors, the changing of gears, the hobbled clip-clop of a slow walk home. The rippled roll of shutters pulled down on late-night cafes, a crackled voice crying street names for taxis, a loud scream that lingers and cracks into laughter, a bang that might just be an old car backfiring, a callbox calling out for an answer, a treeful of birds tricked into morning, a whistle and a shout and a broken glass, a blare of soft music and a blam of hard beats, a barking and yelling and singing and crying and it all swells up all the rumbles and crashes and bangings and slams, all the noise and the rush and the non-stop wonder of the song of the city you can hear if you listen the song and it stops in some rare and sacred dead time, sandwiched between the late sleepers and the early risers, there is a miracle of silence. Everything has stopped. And silence drops down from out of the night, into this city, the briefest of silences, like a falter between heartbeats, like a darkness between blinks. Secretly, there is always this moment, an unexpected pause, a hesitation as one day is left behind and a new one begins. A catch of breath as gasometer lungs begin slow exhalations. A ring of tinnitus as thermostats interrupt air-conditioning fans. These moments are there, always, but they are rarely noticed and they rarely last longer than a flicker of thought. We are in that moment now, there is silence and the whole city is still. The old tall-windowed mills, staggered across the skyline, they are silent, they are keeping their ghosts and their thoughts to themselves. The smoked-glass offices, slung low to the ground, they are still, they are blankly reflecting the haze and shine of the night. Soon, they will resume their business, their coy whispers of ones and zeroes across networks of threaded glass, but now, for a moment, they are hushed. The buses in the depot, waiting for a new day, they are quiet, their metalwork easing and shrinking into place, settling and cooling after eighteen hours of heat and noise, eighteen hours of criss-crossing the city like wool on a loom. And the clubs in the centre, they are empty, the dance-floors sticky and sore from a night's pounding, the lights still turning and blinking, lost shoes and wallets and keys gathered in heaps. And the night-fishers strung out along the canal, feeling the sing of their lines in the water, although they are within yards of each other they are saying nothing, watching luminous floats hang in the night like bottled fireflies, waiting for the dip and strike which will bring a centre to their time here, waiting for the quietness and calm they have come here to find. Even the traffic scattered through these streets: the taxis and the cleaners, the shift-workers and the delivery drivers, even they are held still in this moment, trapped by traffic lights which synchronise red as the system cycles from old day to new, hundreds of feet resting on accelerators, hundreds of pairs of eyes hanging on the lights, all waiting for the amber, all waiting for the green. The whole city has stopped. And this is a pause worth savouring, because the world will soon be complicated again. It's the briefest of pauses, with not time enough to even turn full circle and look at all the lights this city throws out to the sky, and it's a pause which is easily broken. A slamming door, a car alarm, a thin drift of music from half a mile away, and already the city is moving on, already tomorrow is here. The music is coming from a curryhouse near the football ground, careering out of speakers placed outside to attract extra custom. The restaurant is almost empty, a bhindi masala in one corner, a special korma in the other, and the carpark is deserted except for a young couple standing with their arms around each other's waists. They've not been a couple long, a few days perhaps, or a week, and they are both still excited and nervous with desire and possibility. They've come here to dance, drawn sideways from their route home by the music and by bravado, and now they are hesitating, unsure of how to begin, unfamiliar with the steps, embarrassed. But they do begin, and as the first smudges of light seep into the sky from the east, from the far side of the city and in towards these streets, they hold their heads high and their backs straight and step together in time to the slide and wheel of the music. They dance with a style more suited to the ballroom than to the bollywood movies the music comes from, but they dance all the same, hips swinging, waists touching, eyes fixed on eyes. The waiters have come across to the window, they are laughing, they are calling uncle uncle to the man in the kitchen who is finally beginning to clean up after a long night. They dance, and he steps out of the door to watch, wiping his hands on his apron, licking the weary tips of his fingers, pulling at his long beard. They dance, and he smiles and nods and thinks of his wife sleeping at home, and thinks of when they were young and might still have done something like this. Elsewhere, across the city, the day is beginning with a rush and a shout, the fast whine of office hoovers, the locked slam of lorry doors, the hurried clocking on of the early shifts. But here, as the dawn sneaks up on the last day of summer, and as a man with tired hands watches a young couple dance in the carpark of his restaurant, there are only these: sparkling eyes, smudged lipstick, fading starlight, the crunching of feet on gravel, laughter, and a slow walk home. Copyright (c) 2002 by Jon McGregor. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.
