Friends disunited
One Day I Shall Astonish The World
Nina Stibbe Viking, £14.99
The fourth novel from Nina Stibbe is her best yet and it’s a delight to watch this gifted comic writer go from strength to strength.
Here, she tells the story of an endearingly relatable woman’s reckoning with a fraying friendship.
It opens in 2019 with Susan Faye Warren troubled by her relationships with her nearest and dearest. She and husband Roy “stopped having any fun” in 2012, while she’s anxious because the counsellor of her “difficult, angry, killjoy” daughter Honey has asked for a meeting.
Then we rewind to the day in 1990 when Susan met Roy for the first time in the local cafe, knowing from the off that he was husband material (“He was such a pro, that’s what hit me, knowing to pierce the yolks before attempting to sandwich them”).
On the same day, she also met her best friend Norma, temporary manager of the haberdashery shop where Susan was working during university holidays.
Norma is difficult to like, a prickly woman with a superiority complex. But Susan’s feathers aren’t easily ruffled.
“It started to feel as though we were sisters… not that we were alike or aligned but that we were attached for all time.”
However, after Susan gets pregnant, she has to drop out of university. Not only does Norma express strong disapproval, she refuses to be baby Honey’s godmother because “I don’t want to do it”.
From these inauspicious beginnings, the novel follows the two women through the vicissitudes of life over the course of three decades.
Norma becomes an awardwinning poet and lecturer at the university, looking down on Susan who is personal assistant and chauffeur to the vice chancellor.
Susan admits, “I can’t pretend that, over the years, the VC hasn’t put Roy in the shade”, so it comes as a blow when Norma and the VC become more than friends. Adding insult to injury, Norma starts treating Susan like her own personal assistant.
You frequently long for Susan to walk away from what is at times a toxic relationship. As the gap between the women’s lives becomes a gulf, does their friendship have a future?
You’ll be rooting for Susan on every page of a novel packed to the gills with perceptive, laugh-outloud observations and idiosyncratic turns of phrase, putting the quirks of ordinary life under the microscope.