Book review: Life-like by Toby Litt - marriages on the brink
Toby Litt's books have always been so markedly different from one another that it's a challenge picking up the common thread between crime thriller, parody chick-lit, Jamesian meditation and cod-rock memoir. Yet the characters of Paddy and Agatha keep popping up like fixtures on a dinner party circuit, whose behavioural tics and conversational repertoire one has come to recognise.
by Toby Litt
Seagull Books
Toby Litt's books have always been so markedly different from one another that it's a challenge picking up the common thread between crime thriller, parody chick-lit, Jamesian meditation and cod-rock memoir. Yet the characters of Paddy and Agatha keep popping up like fixtures on a dinner party circuit, whose behavioural tics and conversational repertoire one has come to recognise.
The couple first appeared in 2004's Ghost Story, a claustrophobic narrative in which Agatha succumbed to agoraphobia, having miscarried her second child.
Life-Like collects the stories that Litt has published detailing the subsequent course of Paddy and Agatha's relationship, which has endured without exactly going well. In the first sentence, the couple's four-year-old, Max, breaks his arm when his bedroom door blows shut.
Paddy - a philosophy lecturer who was supposed to be on parental duty - knows that the accident is his fault. But he is also determined to leave, as scheduled, for an academic conference in Hull: "The fact that it was Hull seemed to make it less defensible than Glasgow or Manchester. The place didn't possess any philosophical gravitas."
The relative unimportance of short stories is emphasised by Litt's self-deprecatory statement that one piece here, John & John, "won the semi-widely known Manchester Fiction prize". It's also notable that this story - an interior monologue in which Agatha's writing tutor attempts to banish pornographic thoughts while listening to a meditation tape - is the most mannered and indulgent episode in the collection, although it sets up a cleverly bifurcating structure in which Paddy and Agatha's new partners meet new partners who each reveal their own narratives and so forth.