Mismatched from the start: One Day I Shall Astonish the World, by Nina Stibbe, reviewed

First the bad news: Nina Stibbe’s new novel does not feature Lizzie Vogel, the engaging narrator of the trilogy that made her name as a comic novelist after she’d first published some extremely funny letters written during her stint as a nanny in a north London household in the 1980s. Man at the Helm (2015) is the novel Dickens lacked the generosity to write, in which tribute is paid to the creative value of a chaotic childhood presided over by what the conventional world calls an unfit parent. The two which followed covered just a year of Lizzie’s teens and early twenties. The fact that our beady-eyed chronicler remains on the threshold of adult life ensures an atmosphere of optimism, despite the dark strain of jeopardy running through each of the books.

In her fourth novel, which spans the years 1990 to the present, Stibbe has set herself an altogether more challenging task. The backward-looking narrator, Susan, is a garrulous middle-aged wife and mother with too much spirit to identify as disappointed and too much disappointment not to be, just occasionally, disappointing to the reader. The setting, as always, is the Midlands. Susan lives in a modern house in an imaginary town called Brankham, next to the campus of the University of Rutland, where she works in the office of the vice chancellor.

Years earlier she was employed at The Pin Cushion, the town’s haberdashery, and became friends with Norma, the eccentrically dressed and coldy opinionated daughter of its owners. There are signs that they were mismatched from the start. Even as a young woman Susan is a compulsive conversationalist of the one-thing-leading-to-another-by-a-roundabout-route school. Her boyfriend Roy, the marketing manager of the local golf club, ‘soon gets the hang of pointless conjecture’, but Norma is full of red lines and cuts Susan short when she starts to tell a story about a dog or a dream.