Product Description

David Carter cannot help but wish for more: that his wife Eleanor would be the sparkling girl he once found so irresistible; that his job as a museum curator could live up to the promise it once held; that his daughter's arrival could have brought him closer to Eleanor. But a few careless words spoken by his mother's friend have left David restless with the knowledge that his whole life has been constructed around a lie.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #20516 in Books
• Published on: 2007-05-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 384 pages

Review
'McGregor's careful prose is sharpened by anticipation and expectation' Observer 'An homage to ordinary people and ordinary things, to the parts of our lives that often go unspoken moving and honest' The Times 'McGregor's meticulous syntax melts into a hot flood of words This is a decorous novel that rises on occasion to ardour An intimate tale with penetrating things to say about the wider history of twentieth-century Britain' Lucy Hughes-Hallett, Sunday Times 'This is a novel of character and atmosphere The relationship between David and Eleanor from youth to age, imperfect, deeply loving, underpins the whole a book about the search for greater meaning in the strange dance of chance' Carol Birch, Independent

Literary aspiration can't save this British novel from maudlin domestic melodrama.Though McGregor earned a Booker Prize nomination for his debut (If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, 2003), his sophomore work fails to distinguish itself. The major interest here is formalistic, as the narrative cuts back and forth across the decades in the same way that memory might. Memory, secrets, identity and blood ties are the chief concerns, though McGregor doesn't have much that's fresh to say about any of them. A prologue finds a young Irish girl sent to England to serve as a housemaid, where doing the family's bidding results in her pregnancy. She keeps her condition a secret, gives the baby away and goes on with her life. The novel then turns its attention to Eleanor and David Carter, many decades later, before delving into their courtship and individual family histories. David, who comes from a comparatively happy family, has an inordinate boyhood fascination with museums and collecting artifacts, as if connecting with the past can illuminate the present. Since David is the story's protagonist, the reader senses some irony here-he must be the baby who'd been given away, and who apparently has no idea of his own familial history. As David fulfills his ambition to become a curator, neither his parents nor his sister mention anything about adoption, and when the secret comes out (from Aunt Julia, who isn't really his aunt), David is shocked. He falls into marriage with Eleanor, who knows very well who her parents are, but has suffered from an abusive relationship with her mother and the failure of her father to protect her. David and Eleanor start a family of their own, Eleanor succumbs to depression, David considers an affair, parents on each side die, David makes it his life's mission to find his "real" mother.With its plot contrivances and drably conventional characters, this novel never comes alive on the page. (Kirkus Reviews)

Tom Boncza-Tomaszewski, Independent on Sunday
`This is a wonderful novel; low-key but beautifully paced,
scattered with extraordinarily intense moments'

Sunday Times
`McGregor is a brilliant prose stylist, and here he excels at
making the provincial and the ordinary seem extraordinary'

Customer Reviews

Haunting
Jon McGregor's writing is simple and beautiful. I love If Nobody Speaks and this served to reiterate the message that we are all remarkable - lives are lived with little fanfare and here Jon takes those unremarkable lives and lays them bare. I found a great deal of truth in this novel, a great deal that made sense of my own life. In a world populated by uninspiring and turgid bestsellers, this author is a rare treat.

the remarkable within the everyday
In my reading group, we often have a range of reactions to the books we read and this lends a vitality to our discussions. However, when we read Jon McGregor's first book a couple of years ago, it received universal high praise, perhaps more than for anything we have read before or since. So this book, his second, had a lot to live up to.

I really enjoyed it. McGregor has a close and careful style that can illuminate the poetic within ordinary events. His two main characters, after their brief long distance romance as teenagers, settle down to a married life in which disappointment and depression become frequent occurrences. And yet, because of McGregor's sensitivity to nuance and atmosphere, and his affection for his characters, I found myself drawn into their lives, into the rooms in their house, sharing their small triumphs and their sadness with them.

The plot lines involving a mother who abandons her baby, another who shoulders the anger of this adopted son when he discovers the truth about his parentage in adult life, and a third who cruelly undermines her daughter's ambitions, are not particularly original or distinctive. Where a lesser novelist might have woven them into a standard work, McGregor once again skilfully helps us to see the remarkable within the everyday.

Mundane and marvellous
Jon McGregor is the kind of writer I wish I found more often. His first novel was recommended as a novel where not much happens but everything happens.His second novel is more of the same beautifully written, concise, authentic prose.

Writing about `real' life is a skill. Some writers seem to think being gritty and bleak is authentic, that the more depressing a situation the more valid.

From bombed-out Coventry to a changed Northern Ireland, back to wartime London and a desolate Scottish quayside, McGregor portrays the mundane, everyday lives of curator David Carter, his wife Eleanor and the families they came from.

Exploring complex themes without the finished work feeling laboured or try-too-hard
'So Many Ways to begin' takes in failed ambitions, family secrets, resentment and what goes on behind closed doors through a story that skitters along, back and forth in time, with intense moments of poetry.