Cheerful meanderings: Caret, by Adam Mars-Jones, reviewed

The novelistic tube or nozzle through which experience is squeezed in order to be bletted on the page in words, and in turn create the illusion of experience in the reader, is a slender one. Novelists have often perversely focused on the narrowest of lives. Xavier de Maistre wrote an entire travelogue in the 1790s about 42 days spent in his room, while Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s debut novel in 1985 was about a character refusing to leave his bathroom.

Should undertakers ever have suntans? And when does ‘mummy’ become ‘mum’ as a form of address?

These spectacular exercises in technique present a parallel to what has always been the case, the existence that contains, as it were, few plot options. Many of the great 19th-century novels are about the way their narratives have to fall into ruts, because the lives they chronicle have so few real choices. Often these are about women, perhaps none more powerful than Margaret Oliphant’s Miss Marjoribanks, about a supremely intelligent, able woman unable to take possession of the plot she deserves.