BEST BOOKS FOR...
STAYING NEIGHBOURLY
THE author and broadcaster suggests key novels to help you through the trickier times in life
I HAVE lived in the same London street for 13 years. I used to nod to the neighbours, but it was not the sort of place that organised street parties.
But when my house burnt down, my anonymous neighbours suddenly leapt into play, offering shelter, tea, dog sitting and all kinds of TLC. They were tremendous and the right kind of neighbour, discreet but there when you need them.
You only have to read the hilarious novels of E. F. Benson to know how quickly those that look like good neighbours can become frenemies.
Miss Mapp is the queen bee of her social circle, and when Lucia, an even more formidable social operator, moves to the town, Miss Mapp is all sweetness and light.
But wary cordiality soon turns into a rivalry of New York crime proportions; no one is killed, but recipes for lobster mousse are stolen and binoculars are trained through windows. The books are acidly funny, but also a pitch-perfect template about how not to behave if you want to get on with your neighbours.
Neighbours don’t just jostle for social position, as the folks of Tarbox, the fictional community of John Updike’s novel Couples, show. They can get up close and personal in other ways, too.
Set in the Sixties, it deals with what happens when neighbours start having affairs with each other. Piet, the married hero of the novel, strains the limits of the community when he starts having an affair with Foxy Whitman, the glamorous newcomer, who is also married.
Discreet affairs are tolerated by their circle, but Piet and Foxy make the terrible mistake of falling in love. The moral of the story seems to be that the Bible is spot on when it talks about not coveting thy neighbour’s wife — proximity makes a marital breakdown even messier.
Bunting or brusqueness? The inhabitants of John Lanchester’s South London street in his novel Capital live in their separate worlds until a mysterious figure starts painting the slogan ‘We want what you’ve got’ on their road. It could bring them together but instead it highlights their differences.
This is a book that will have you going next door bearing home-made cakes: true neighbourliness, as long as it never turns into nosiness, is a wonderful thing.