| Married people -- Fiction. |
| Marriage -- Fiction |
| Domestic fiction. |
| Married couples |
| Married persons |
| People, Married |
| Persons, Married |
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Summary
Summary
Hailed as "one of the most thrilling writers at work today" (Huffington Post), Diana Evans reaches new heights with her searing depiction of two couples struggling through a year of marital crisis. In a crooked house in South London, Melissa feels increasingly that she's defined solely by motherhood, while Michael mourns the former thrill of their romance. In the suburbs, Stephanie's aspirations for bliss on the commuter belt, coupled with her white middle-class upbringing, compound Damian's itch for a bigger life catalyzed by the death of his activist father. Longtime friends from the years when passion seemed permanent, the couples have stayed in touch, gathering for births and anniversaries, bonding over discussions of politics, race, and art. But as bonds fray, the lines once clearly marked by wedding bands aren't so simply defined. Ordinary People is a moving examination of identity and parenthood, sex and grief, and the fragile architecture of love.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Evans's striking novel (following 26A) investigates the relationships of two sets of friends as they navigate pivotal moments during 2008. Melissa and Michael remain engaged after 13 years; Melissa misses her former job as a magazine's fashion editor, which she left to care for her seven-year-old, Ria, and infant, Blake, while Michael longs for the passionate relationship they used to have. Continually feeling rebuffed at home, Michael searches for attention from others and notices a younger woman in his office. Hesitant to be unfaithful, Michael plans an outing to connect with Melissa, but the evening falls short of expectations and Melissa withdraws further. Meanwhile, in the second narrative, Michael's friend Damian is frustrated with Stephanie, his wife of nearly 16 years, because she refuses to live in London like their friends, opting instead to raise their children in the suburbs, thereby squelching his dream of city life and ambition of being a writer. Along with coping with the recent loss of his activist father, Damian believes his wife and her family don't share his values, and instead measure their success by the size of their home and the private lessons they provide their children. With penetrating emotional and psychological observations, Evans creates a realistic portrayal of the couples as they struggle to redefine commitment. Readers looking for careful studies of relationship dynamics will find much to contemplate. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Guardian Review
The novelist on her struggle with Don DeLillo, feeling changed by Arundhati Roy and why Philip Pullman is not just for children The book I am currently reading Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Idiot and Sally Rooney's Conversations With Friends . They're working pretty well alongside each other. I'm also reading Ocean Vuong's Night Sky With Exit Wounds which is beguiling and sublime. The book that changed my life The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy had a very deep impact on me. It steered me into a more truthful state from which to write 26a , my first novel, and the writing of that book changed my life. The book I wish I'd written I didn't wish I'd written Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates when I read it, but I did wish for it a deeper magnanimity towards women, so I attempted something like that with Ordinary People . The book that influenced my writing Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace and Anna Karenina are still seeping through my consciousness years after reading them. His simultaneous conveying of the panoramic and the subjective is something I naturally espouse in my own writing. The books that are most under rated Jean Rhys is still underrated in relation to her talent and body of work, and I think more people should read Deborah Eisenberg. Her stories are electric. The book that changed my mind Books are constantly changing my mind. Lately I've been reading Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials over breakfast and it's making me think about the falsity of age demarcations in analysing readerships. Books are by their nature transcendental. The last book that made me cry If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin. But then he always makes me cry. I used to read to the bitter end even if I was hating it but not any more. Life is brief The last book that made me laugh Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo. It's laugh-out-loud hilarious, especially its take on gentrification. The book I couldn't finish Underworld by Don DeLillo, among others. I used to read to the bitter end even if I was hating it but not any more. Life is brief. The book I'm most ashamed not to have read One day I'll get round to Paradise Lost and The Odyssey but before that I must read Octavia Butler 's Kindred . I'm not ashamed, though. Reading should not be stressful. The book I give as a gift One Christmas I gave my mother Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's The Thing Around Your Neck , to help her feel connected to home by reading about Nigerian characters. I think short stories make good gifts, but it has to be carefully judged. The book I'd most like to be remembered for 26a is the one closest to my heart. I hope it will be remembered in the midst of mental or spiritual pain as a source of empathy and understanding. My earliest reading memory King Lear at school, made larger than life by a brilliant and passionate English teacher. I loved the drama and pathos and I had a deep affection for Lear. He reminded me of my father. My comfort read When I've lost the plot I dip into Alice Walker's In Search of Our Mother s' Gardens . I find it grounding and clarifying.
Kirkus Review
A portrait of a relationship on the brink set in Great Recession-era London.British author Evans (26a, 2005), winner of the Orange Award for New Writers, has centered her new novel on a love in crisis. Black Londoners Melissa and Michael are on "the far side of youth, at a moment in their lives when the gradual descent into age was beginning to appear," and outwardly they seem to be a properly suited pair. Melissa's best friend, Hazel, even refers to them as "Chocolate"playing off their initials, MMand what could be more perfect than that? Nonetheless, as can be expected in a novel dedicated to the underside of a long-term relationship, all is not well at 13 Paradise Row, the home Melissa and Michael share with their two children. Balancing dry humor, wit, and empathy, Evans expertly delineates her main characters' frustrations: The expectations of both motherhood and romantic partnership leave Melissa on the precipice of exploding in anger or having a breakdown, while Michael laments, mostly while drinking red wine, that his desire for Melissa is unrequited, a view steeped in nostalgia for the honeymoon phase of their relationship and explained through the music of John Legend, whose second single gives the book its title. Most of the time Evans' writing is accurate as she moves from the small details of domestic life to larger ideasfeminism, urban life, black identity. Here she is describing the doldrums of monogamy: "Passion, at its truest and most fierce, does not liaise with toothpaste. It does not wait around for toning and exfoliation. It wants spontaneity. It wants recklessness. Passion is dirty, and they were too clean." At other moments, Evans' narrative choices seem perplexing, such as her use of the slang phrase "off the hizzle" as a refrain; it seems dated and less cool on the page than when emanating from the mouth of Snoop Dogg circa 2005. In fact, the biggest weakness of an otherwise astute novel is Evans' occasional overreliance on pop culture. For instance, the story is bookended by the first election of Barack Obama and the death of Michael Jackson, two culturally significant moments that are, at best, tangential to the story.Evans frankly and unflinchingly depicts a romance overwhelmed by the ennui of everyday life. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Two couples navigating the mostly quiet varieties of domestic terror are at the heart of Evans' (26A, 2005) deep and addictive third novel. Though Damian doesn't feel he belongs there, he lives with his wife and their three children in the London suburb of Dorking. Their friends Michael and Melissa have the trappings of marriage two kids and an old house in South London without the rings and paperwork. Historical and pop-culture details enrich the story: the novel opens at a party celebrating the first election of Barack Obama, a John Legend album lends the book its title and gives it a sort of heartbeat soundtrack, and Evans brings to literary life the burned-down Crystal Palace that Michael and Melissa live in the shadows of. Although Michael would marry Melissa without hesitation, he's also the first to force the couple's private turmoil to the surface. Damian, meanwhile, isn't sure that he grieves his father's recent death, and he secretly pines for Melissa. Evans zooms out to build her characters' culturally rich backstories as they struggle to recognize their older selves and the relationships that have aged along with them. A probing, entertaining, and self-affirming novel of men and women getting relatably lost in the crises and hauntings of early midlife.--Annie Bostrom Copyright 2018 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
DIANA EVANS'S third novel, "OrdinaryPeople," begins with a glamorous London bash celebrating the 2008 election of Barack Obama. It's a dazzling opening scene studded with the sharp observations at which Evans excels, bringing to vivid life a capacious social world while simultaneously commenting on it. The wealthy hosts of this party (they chose their south London neighborhood "for its creative energy and the charisma of its poverty") have invited "all the important, successful and beautiful people" they know. It's a long list. To a soundtrack of Kris Kross and Jay-Z, people "kept on coming, men in good moods and just-so trainers, women with varying degrees of fake hair, their curls, their tresses, their long straight manes trailing down their backs as they walked into the music, like so many Beyoncés." After this sweeping establishing shot, Evans zooms in on Michael and Melissa. Pushing 40, they're still gorgeous, even if their glow has begun to fade, their oncesteamy relationship faltering. As they drive away from the party, Michael hopes they will make love. Melissa hopes they won't. Arriving home, she spots a mouse under the tub and soon they're bickering about household chores as she disappears into a long-sleeved nightgown. The novel's title refers to a John Legend ballad about the struggle to keep a relationship alive once the initial passion subsides. Despite the Obama party that opens the novel and the fact that most of its central characters are black, "Ordinary People" doesn't turn out to be the big, meaty social novel that the first pages promise, but a rambling, smallish drama of domesticity and its discontents. Melissa and Michael aren't the book's only unhappy couple. Michael's friend Damian, a frustrated novelist, sneaks smokes in his backyard and wonders why he let his practical, maternal wife, Stephanie, drag him to a semidetached house in the hinterlands. He blames Stephanie, a stolid homemaker, for his artistic failures. Damian imagines he would be happier married to someone a bit sexier, a bit edgier, someone more like Melissa. Or how he imagines Melissa. Alas, readers may be less beguiled by Melissa, the linchpin of this novel, than the other characters seem to be. Once an editor at a fashion magazine, Melissa decided to go freelance after the birth of her second child, picturing "a blissful new life of evenly balanced and creative working motherhood." She envisioned her baby dozing "with the sun filtering in through a window while she sat happily at her desk working." She is dismayed to find herself enduring inane baby singalongs, irritated by fatuous chitchat with other mothers and anguished when the exterminator interrupts her writing time. She misses the buzz of an office, of going out for drinks and wearing "all those swish and colorful clothes." These are valid complaints, but hardly amount to the shattering life trauma Melissa (and apparently Evans) believes them to be and over which she broods for many pages. Bored and unfulfilled, Melissa takes out her anger on Michael. She blames patriarchy for her dissatisfaction, likening her plight to the oppression depicted in feminist horror stories like "The Yellow Wallpaper." There's a major flaw in this reasoning, one that undermines her appeal as a character. Under Victorian patriarchy, women had no choices, which sometimes drove them mad. Melissa has myriad choices and she freely made one. She just doesn't like it. Searching, dissatisfied women have traditionally made fascinating heroines because they've challenged stultifying cultural scripts. But the most intriguing character in "Ordinary People" isn't Melissa, chafing at constraints and looking for someone to blame. It's cleareyed Stephanie, who has surveyed the options, chosen her life and accepted its limitations. Initially, her "aptitude for contentment" seems less seductive and mysterious than Melissa's restlessness. By the end of this novel, it seems far more so. jennifer reese is a book critic who has reviewed for The Washington Post, NPR, Slate and Entertainment Weekly.
Library Journal Review
Bookended by President Obama's 2008 election victory and Michael Jackson's death, this new novel from Evans (26a) tells the story of a group of young, mostly black Londoners searching for equanimity in their personal and professional lives, with the music of John Legend, Jill Scott, and Amy -Winehouse providing the soundtrack as they navigate the rocky roads from dating to mating and parenting. Michael and Melissa ("M & M" to their friends) are parents to seven-year-old Ria and baby Blake. While Michael works long hours in the city, -Melissa resentfully juggles children, work deadlines, and a house suffering from mice and mold. Michael remains deeply committed to their relationship (together for 13 years, they have never married) and to their multicultural community, but -Melissa has become disenchanted with both him and the drugs and gangs that have entered and endangered the neighborhood. Meanwhile, their friends, including Stephanie, whose white, middle-class upbringing is beginning to clash with partner Damian's activist urges, face similar work and relationship challenges and look to Melissa and Michael as an ideal, unbreakable force. -Verdict With astute observations on marriage and parenthood, sublime -descriptions of sex, and an accompanying playlist to boot, this novel is anything but ordinary. It's a sparkling gem. [See Prepub Alert, 3/12/18.]-Barbara Love, formerly with Kingston Frontenac P.L., Ont. © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.