He’s got a winning formula, this writer, and he’s sticking to it. Set the action over seven days, in and around the Sussex town of Lewes, with occasional day trips to London; write about what you know (Sussex, script-writing, being 54, long marriages, worrying about your post-university children as well as your aged parents with Alzheimer’s, career anxiety, dinner-party anxiety); keep the chapters short (never more than ten pages) and avoid slabs of prose, so the pages are broken up into highly readable short paragraphs and dialogue; write in the present tense; and, within each chapter, keep a strict observance of the Unity of Person, so that the reader steps inside the mind of one character and sees the world solely through his or her eyes.
Done well, this kind of thing can be delicious to read. And William Nicholson does it compellingly and brilliantly. How does he make you care so much? Why do you give a fig whether Alan can stop the rabbits from finding their way into his garden, or whether his wife will buy a saddle of lamb rather than a leg of lamb for Saturday’s dinner party? It’s his use of third-person interior monologue. One by one, as they muse on trivial and profound matters, his characters strip themselves bare, down to their deepest anxieties and fears.
As you read, you feel a deep compassion and you also see yourself. Here’s the freelancer waiting in an office reception, having arrived punctually for a meeting with someone important:
Unsummoned, waiting in the lobby, he looks about him with a half smile, to indicate that something quite other than the life of the lobby is occupying his mind, and that the little he does take in he finds gently amusing.
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