Those weren’t the days

If you wanted a brief epigraph for Linda Grant’s recent fiction, then five words from Dorothy Parker might well do the trick: ‘Time doth flit/ Oh shit.’ Certainly, there aren’t many writers who seem so astonished, even affronted, by life’s tendency (admittedly a strange one) to pass by more quickly than you ever imagined.

Her previous novel, We Had It So Good, followed a group of students from the Oxford of the late 1960s to the present day, where they were bewildered to find themselves in the unthinkable position of being quite old. Now her new one does the same with a group of students from the York of the early 1970s.

Inevitably, then, the two books do have similar themes, as youthful ideals come up against the annoyingly intractable world.  The big difference, though, is that Upstairs at the Party is substantially gloomier. As the title implies, most of the characters in We Had It So Good did at least enjoy pretty enviable lives before the unexpected arrival of senescence. Here, almost nobody’s works out all that well. Grant is also a lot harsher on the youthful ideals themselves, depicting them not just as disappointingly unworkable, but as ridiculously childish. The York campus of the early 1970s is described as ‘a playpen’, where the central group ‘knew with the green force of teenage certainty, the driving fuse of insufferable self-confidence, that human weaknesses …were going to wither away.’

The trouble is that this emphasis, while bracing in itself, means that much of the best and most heartfelt writing comes in the first section. Grant’s evocations of the period are not always cliché-free: ‘Girls in Laura Ashley frocks let their long hair fall across their faces, and boys in loon pants and cheesecloth shirts wooed them with tightly rolled joints assembled on the back of Joni Mitchell albums.’