Dear readers,
With apologies to Stephen Hawking, anyone who’s ever experienced a root canal or a first kiss knows something about the relativity of time. Who hasn’t felt entire weeks go by like flashcards, or wondered why certain situations (a bad date, a flight delay) seem to open up wormhole portals to eternity?
C’est la vie, of course, unless you are some type of time-lord wizard. But novelists are wizards, or at least magicians, and one of their favorite tricks is to fit whole narrative worlds inside a single day, book-shaped ships squeezed into bottles.
The day itself doesn’t have to be noteworthy or even nominally eventful, which is often the point; think of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, preparing to host her umpteenth plummy soirée, or Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Ivan Denisovich, whose big score in the gulag is getting an extra bread crust and two bowls of gruel. But watch what a smart writer can do with the neat little nesting dolls of diversion and digression, plot and memory.
The authors in this week’s newsletter take bigger swings, in that the days they build their stories around are so obviously the kind you would circle in red on a calendar. Plot machinery, though, still takes a second seat to character, observation and style. Because the best magic trick, the one that makes sleepless nights and long empty afternoons disappear, doesn’t rest on clever conceits; it just has to be a really good read.
— Leah
“Injury Time,” by Beryl Bainbridge
Fiction, 1977
Welcome to 1970s London, where it is à la mode, apparently, to throw a dinner party to appease your tetchy mistress. Edward, a stout, fretful accountant deeply fond of his rose bushes and tobacco pipe, knows he can’t give Binny the full privileges of a wife, owing to the inconvenient fact that he already has one at home. But he can invite a client called George Simpson and his wife to Binny’s shabby, chaotic rowhouse for an evening of lamb chops and stilted conversation.
It’s all going badly in an ordinary way — the chops are overcooked and the pudding, like the two couples’ social chemistry, a lost cause — when several uninvited guests show up, strangers whom Binny vaguely recognizes from her shopping rounds earlier in the day. They are, it turns out, deranged bank robbers on the lam, though they may come to regret taking this particular group hostage.
Bainbridge’s brand of social satire has a sort of bright ruthlessness. Edward and George, with their soft bellies and self-regard, are quickly shown to be useless in a crisis, and a rape scene comes on so abruptly and casually that it’s no wonder the victim almost immediately disassociates; readers might want to do the same.
But as the story lurches from the morning’s small melodramas to the unfolding anarchy of an increasingly violent evening, “Injury Time” becomes more than a tart, tidy commentary on class and gender roles. Bainbridge, a certified Dame and not-so-secret nihilist, lets it all hang out: the delusions and insecurities of romantic love; the wonky whims of fate; the eggshell fragility of a well-ordered life, blown up by a knock at the door.
Read if you like: Cringe comedy, Stockholm syndrome, the 1972 Luis Buñuel movie “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie”
Available from: Various used booksellers, or a 2003 reissue
“The 25th Hour,” by David Benioff
Fiction, 2001
A decade before he became a celebrated co-creator of HBO’s blood-and-dragons juggernaut “Game of Thrones,” David Benioff was a New York novelist riffing on an itchier, more low-flying kind of revenge plot. His lean, punchy debut drops in on the day before Monty Brogan, a Brooklyn-bred small-time drug dealer, is set to begin a mandatory seven-year sentence.
With only a few hours of freedom left, Monty sets out to spend them the way most 27-year-olds might: taking his dog, a chewed-up but ferociously loyal rescue named Doyle, for long walks; hanging out with his beautiful girlfriend, Naturelle, and his two best friends from high school, a teacher and a Wall Street trader; getting quietly obliterated in a bar.
There’s even a farewell party at a Manhattan nightclub thrown by his kingpin boss, with champagne, pretty girls and a throbbing V.I.P. room. But Monty, who has always been able to charm his way out of lesser crimes and misdemeanors, knows what’s waiting for him on the other side; he’s too pretty for prison and too smart to try to disappear as long as the Russian mafia has his number.
Benioff writes against the clock with a kind of muscular, young-dude swagger, and his portrait of pre-9/11 New York feels like a snapshot of a lost city, full of sticky-floored bodegas and silent, snow-crusted streets. It’s not surprising that the book often reads like a screenplay; Spike Lee directed a 2002 film adaptation starring Edward Norton and Philip Seymour Hoffman.
That film, slick and nicely paranoid, is pretty faithful. But it misses some of the interior world-building and ring-a-ding rhythms of Benioff’s voice on the page, as well as the visceral kick of his final scene: a flash-forward fantasy of the way things might have gone for Monty, if life ever actually worked out like it does in the movies.
Read if you like: Richard Price, pit bulls, watching other people make poor decisions
Available from: A Penguin Books paperback, or select Brooklyn stoop sales
Why don’t you …
Revisit the terrifying snobs and shameless hangers-on of Edward St. Aubyn’s first Patrick Melrose novel, “Never Mind,” which fits all kinds of upper-crust depravity into a day?
Pass an evening inside the deathbed monologue of a complicit Pinochet-era priest in Robert Bolaño’s killer novella “By Night in Chile”?
Go back to school via Rosalind Brown’s “Practice,” in which an Oxford undergrad spends her cozy winter Sunday in a haze of Shakespeare, tea and sexual reverie?
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