Diana Evans, author of the prize-winning 26a, returns with an intimate portrait of London, an exploration of modern relationships and black identity, and that mid-life moment when a gap emerges between who we think we are and who we are becoming. Melissa and Michael, a couple of thirteen years, have taken up residence in a crooked house in the south of the city, a new baby making them a family of … baby making them a family of four. Feeling defined solely by motherhood, Melissa’s need to reclaim her identity is spilling into resentment at her partner and a growing fear that something unnatural is living in their home. Her solace in her Nigerian mother’s stews and spells only infuriates Michael, who desperately misses the excitement of their lives before children.
Further south, in the suburbs, Damian and Stephanie enter a year of marital disquiet. Damian’s Trinidadian political activist father has died, and he finds himself adrift and hungering for the city–just as his admiration for Stephanie’s wholesome aspirations and white middle class upbringing begin to feel more like a trap than an escape. With the election of Barack Obama posing a distant perfection to which modern couples might aspire, these two ordinary partnerships collide and conjoin in a building chaos born from their extraordinary desires.
Ordinary People is an intimate, immersive study of identity and parenthood, sex and grief, friendship and aging, and the fragile architecture of love. With its distinctive prose and addictive soundtrack, it is the story of our lives, and those moments that threaten to unravel us.more
Diana Evans is a lyrical and glorious writer; a precise poet of the human heart.
‘Ordinary People’ takes place in London during the period between two watershed cultural moments–the election of Barack Obama to the American presidency, and the death of Michael Jackson. One moment represents a resurgence of hope and the other the death of innocence. These occurrences are the perfect metaphors for where the two couples that are the subject of this novel — Michael and Melissa, and Damian and Stephanie — find themselves in their lives and relationships. They are just past the most vibrant, optimistic years of their youth, and close to that time when people begin to “settle in” and resign themselves to the loss of their wildest and best dreams.
Damian has just lost his father, and thinks that he feels nothing about it, what he does feel is himself emotionally drifting away from his dreams of becoming a writer and from wife, Stephanie, for whom a domestic life is entirely enough. Michael is as in love with Melissa as he as ever been, and feels almost daily that it was only an accident of luck and fate that she too seemed to love him. There is something about Melissa though that remains elusive. Even though she and Michael share a life and two children, they are not married, a state of affairs that she seems indifferent to, though he is not. Damian’s father’s death, and Michael and Melissa’s purchase of their first proper, adult house are the catalysts that will lead these two couples to take stock of where they are in their lives and relationships, and where they want to be.
Diana Evans is an extraordinary writer. She writes vividly, with humor, intelligence and true originality. She examines her characters’ interiors so well that you feel as though you have crawled into each one of them for a spell and see the world precisely as they see it. I didn’t ‘root for’ or relate to one person more than I did any other, seeing the entire ensemble cast as protagonists. We saw more of, and became somewhat more intimately acquainted with Michael and Melissa than we did the other couple, and with Stephanie as an individual least of all. But nevertheless, there was nothing about any of them that felt inscrutable or inaccessible.
The style of writing is undoubtedly literary, with many, many wry observations about society and race and human nature and committed relationships, and city living, all thrown in like little gems. And they were gems. I highlighted many of them. Occasionally, though, I felt I was being treated to treatise of Diana Evans’ worldview rather than that of the characters, so that however astute those insights, they sometimes read as interruptions of the narrative flow rather than integrated ideas essential to the story. That quibble is a fairly small one, however, because this book on balance was a thing to be savored. I smiled often, laughed quite a bit and once it was done, immediately felt nostalgic and wished I could visit with these characters for a while more.
Recommended for lovers of introspective literary fiction.
That rarest thing: a literary novel about real, recognizable human beings―a poignant portrait of middle life in London’s middle class. Evans has given us four thirtysomething characters so perfectly drawn that they seem to come from a brilliant Netflix dramedy, but has rendered them with a classical prose so confident that it seems to come from a 19th century novel. Beach reading for the thinking beachgoer: as intelligent and insightful as it is hilariously entertaining.
Diana Evans has masterfully crafted a beautiful, nuanced story about love, loss, and redemption. With compelling prose and an uncanny insight into the questions life throw at us as human beings, she has established herself as a voice to behold.