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I’m not usually in favour of trigger warnings in novels, but please: if you’re a London parent in your mid-thirties, approach Ordinary People with caution. Diana Evans doesn’t simply mine that moving-to-the-outer Zones, sex-life-ceding-to-Mamas & Papas paraphernalia, existential-crisis-on-the-176 time of life for social comedy. She positively gambols over the crushed dreams of her characters.
She can make the “psycho-verbal leprosy” of mothers’ conversation at a baby music session the stuff of horror: “That thing was happening again, where her mouth made sentences it wasn’t interested in saying, her voice came out flat and monotonal, and she could feel an essential part of herself draining away…”
She can turn an attempt at conjugal intimacy into a doomed push at Verdun: “…it was so late now, the birds were actually singing, but the last thing that dies in mankind is hope”. As with loaded guns in Chekhov plays, it’s a fair bet that if a character looks forward to smoking his last cigarette then it will be crushed in his pocket as his wife lectures him about fitted sheets. Ordinary People is a very funny book. But you’d better like your comedy acrid, bitter and spicy.
Evans, who is half-Nigerian, half-English, won the inaugural Orange New Writers Prize in 2005 for her debut, 26a — a tragi-comedy about two bi-racial twins from Neasden — and followed it up with The Wonder (2009), drawing on her earlier career as a dancer. The title of her third comes from a John Legend song and reflects Evans’s musicality for sure, but also her interest in writing about the ordinary lives of contemporary black Londoners.
She recently wrote in praise of John Updike for “giving the mundane its beautiful due”, and shares with him a tyrannical control over her characters as well as an innocent delight in simply describing the world. She writes about race but it’s race as a platform for identity crises, mismatched intimacies and the appropriate amount of time to spend choosing a sandwich in Pret A Manger.
The novel opens in 2008 at a party in Brixton to celebrate Barack Obama’s inauguration. Q-Tip and Jay-Z are on the stereo, the men arrive in “good moods and just-so trainers”, the women with “varying degrees of fake hair… like so many Beyoncés”. It ends around the death of Michael Jackson in June 2009. In between, we meet Melissa and Michael, living with two children in a semi-haunted, mouse-infested house in Crystal Palace, where the absent Victorian exhibition space becomes a none-too-subtle metaphor for their non-marriage. Then there’s Stephanie, a suburban princess who has planned motherhood with military precision, and paunchy Damian, the son of a famous black activist, now living in Surrey purgatory.
Two dissatisfied couples? You might guess where this is leading. But Evans has a way of up-ending expectations with a Victorian Gothic-by-way-of Get Out twist; or a sad reminder of the fragility of young black bodies. A teenager is stabbed near Michael and Melissa’s house; she wants to move, he can’t bear the idea of leaving multi-racial London; meanwhile, the blood never washes from the pavement: “It was there if you knew it was there.”
There are moments where the mundane gets too much due: three pages on the make-up section of Selfridges is enough for anyone; plus some of the male dialogue doesn’t ring true. But for the most part this is a reminder of the power that only the novel has: to show you a familiar world from someone else’s perspective. And to make you cringe to your very soul.
Ordinary People by Diana Evans (Chatto, £12.99), buy it now.
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