Reasons to Be Cheerful by Nina Stibbe
YSENDA MAXTONE GRAHAM
Reasons to Be Cheerful By Nina Stibbe Viking £12.99
Well, I’ll certainly never look at a dentist in the same way again, after reading this wonderfully funny novel by Nina Stibbe.
It opens with J P Wintergreen, dental surgeon, self-treating late one afternoon, causing the 18-year-old narrator, Lizzie Vogel (his dental assistant) to be late for picking up her little brother from Curious Minds nursery. This is in Leicester in 1979. There are cacti on the windowsill in the reception area.
‘Back at the mirror, he loaded a syringe, lifted his upper lip and injected himself somewhere above the right incisor.’ I was gripped by this macabre dental scene, and was fretting about Lizzie being late at Curious Minds.
Already, halfway through page one, I loathed the dentist. As the novel progresses, his unattractive traits are revealed one by one; he ‘hated seeing casual patients, especially just before golf’. He just lies down in his own dentist’s chair and listens to music with his eyes closed. The patient is in such agony that she pulls a tentacle off one of the cacti. ‘Don’t worry,’ says Lizzie. ‘People are always taking it out on the plants.’
He insists on using the lavatory in Lizzie’s top-floor rented flat above the surgery, for privacy’s sake: a small detail that makes you hate him. And he’s having an affair with Tammy, the practice manager, making her ‘try for a baby’ at crack of dawn every morning, which apparently is ‘putting her right off sex’. He’s a xenophobe, not even a good dentist and is trying to get into the Freemasons.
Lizzie herself is in love with a sweet man called Andy Nicolello, the lab technician, who doesn’t know how to eat a Kitkat properly because his parents never had a television or even electricity – so he has never seen the advertisement. He bites into the whole thing rather than breaking it into four fingers. ‘Because of Andy’s manners and gentleness,’ Lizzie says, ‘I entertained the possibility that he might be gay or asexual. Men were beginning to be so then – often the nicest ones.’
He turns out to be neither. He comes to her flat to use her washing machine (a Hoover Aristocrat) and they sort of start going out with each other, ‘top-half only’.
Nina Stibbe came onto the scene in 2013 with the publication of Love, Nina, the unwittingly marvellous letters she’d written to her sister while being nanny to Mary-kay Wilmers’s children in north London in 1982.
This is her fifth book and she’s still on sparkling form. Love, Nina was set in the London she came to Leicester from. This novel depicts the city she left, seen through the eyes of an 18-year-old girl trying to make sense of the adult world. I think it’s called Reasons to Be Cheerful because, several times, she mentions Ian Dury, who sang Reasons to Be Cheerful, Part 3 in 1979. There’s lots of period detail, from Reggie Bosanquet to Spangles. ‘Men often looked like one newsreader or another back then,’ Lizzie remarks.
She gives us useful instruction in how to be a good dental patient. ‘I’d been admiring Mrs Smith’s perfect conduct. Open mouth. Tissue ready in hand, efficient rinsing on command, spitting into the centre of the spittoon, no drips or spray or strings of saliva, and resuming the open-mouthed treatment pose afterwards. No trying to talk.’
I said the book was wonderfully funny, and it is, but there’s a horrible, tragic moment near the end. Are you allowed suddenly to put horrible tragedy into your comedy? I know Shakespeare nearly did, with ‘Kill Claudio’ in Much Ado, and Malvolio is pretty sad, but nothing too tragic actually happened.
Stibbe’s total volte face of mood comes as a dreadful shock. Perhaps it brings the jolt we need in order for an accurate portrayal of ‘in the midst of life, we are in death’. But she had lulled me into a false sense of relaxed hilarity at the very idea of the British Dental Association’s Annual Winter Dinner Dance at the Swan Hotel in Loughborough.
‘I’d known sadness before,’ Lizzie writes, ‘I’d seen it, but I’d not experienced the sort of pain that makes a person switch sandwich preference.’
In the midst of death, we are still very much in life.