Motherload

The other night, my husband and I had an argument. Not very uplifting, and I won't bore you with the details. Suffice to say it was about one of the two main subjects married people tend to fight over, and it wasn't about sex. The argument came pretty much out of nowhere, and our son was in the bath in the next room. He was playing away, chatting to himself, even as I stormed, and husband snapped. Later on our son came downstairs to kiss me goodnight, and made no mention of the parental explosion. I put it to the back of my mind, still angry. The next morning, he came downstairs with his bear, and told me, "My bear's said I have to pack my clothes and leave". A knot formed deep in my stomach. Some of these words he'd overheard from me the night before. What had gone on in his mind? What had he understood? How had he come to the decision to use his bear to represent his anxiety? Which elements were conscious, and which unconscious? What had I meant by...

I knew going into reading Kathleen MacMahon's first novel, This is How it Ends , that I would have trouble with it. Straightforwardly, this is because it received an enormous advance, and I'm envious. I'm hoping that by outing that here and now, what I have to say will somehow be more objective, as opposed to simply objectionable.  Let me also say, however, that I really wanted to enjoy it — no one goes into reading a novel wanting it to be rubbish. There isn't enough time for that. You're always hoping for gold. Here are the problems I had with it: 1. Contrived literariness It’s such obviously obvious literary ground. It comes across like a recipe for a 'literary novel' — you can feel the market positioning.  Can you, by the way, have a 'literary novel'? Surely something's either brilliantly well written, or it's not. Surely 'literature' refers to a piece of writing that's so powerful it st...