Victoria Wood redux LUCY LETHBRIDGE

One Day I Shall Astonish the World

Nina Stibbe is a chronicler of a world immediately recognisable as provincial mid-20th-century Britain.

Even when, as in her latest novel, she is actually writing about the last three decades, her characters are comfortably locked in the endless 1970s childhood of the middle-aged middle class.

This is part of her novels’ great appeal: they are touchingly elegiac in their celebration of a kind of low-tech cosiness. She has a peerless ear for the befuddling euphemisms of middle England and an astute but tender eye for foibles, delusion and pomposity. Her fictions crackle with sharp dialogue in search of a good sitcom to display it to advantage.

In One Day I Shall Astonish the World,

set in an imaginary town called Brankham, clustered about the campus of the University of Rutland, teenage friends Susan and Norma work together in Norma’s parents’ haberdashery store, the Pin Cushion, and discuss their futures.

Keen-to- please Susan is the one who tells the enigmatic but hard-boiled scientist Norma about literature. Norma is the one who goes off and becomes an academic and an award-winning poet.

Meanwhile Susan gets pregnant, marries her boyfriend Roy and stays behind the counter of the Pin Cushion.

It’s discombobulating to meet a Susan, Norma and Roy in the early 1990s. Those names surely belong to young people a generation earlier; to a period when high streets still commonly had haberdashers.

But this is Stibbe’s out-of-time England – and, being intensely familiar, it has its own coherence.

Talkative Susan is the narrator and, like her creator, is an entertaining observer of the changing scene, with a beady eye for absurdity – especially the absurdity of men. In particular, there’s poor old Roy with his Ford Escort and his job at the golf club, his Diet Ribena habit and the way he carefully places a watercress garnish in the ashtray.

Roy won’t eat any vegetables but baked beans and iceberg lettuce. Like all the best comic writers, Stibbe knows how to turn bathos into pathos and then turn it back again. An iceberg lettuce is infinitely funnier than an ordinary lettuce because its name suggests pretensions to grandeur far beyond sandwich-filler. Roy likes to experiment with sex on the stairs, ‘it being easier for his knees’. There are echoes of Victoria Wood and Joe Orton.

Norma marries, too – to a wealthy investor in the Pin Cushion with another unlikely name, Hugo Pack Allen, who turns out to be not only a marijuana dealer on the side but also a ‘sex addict with a lifetime’s disqualification from driving’.

Over the next 30 years, we see Susan and Norma’s lives develop and intersect. Honey, Susan and Roy’s daughter, gets through a tricky period and ends up with a special friend called Darnley, formerly Heather. It turns out that Roy has had a precocious illegitimate child, Grace, with his former landlady who is a faddish health nut.

When the middle-aged Susan becomes PA to the university VC (Stibbe has some fun with acronym fever), she gets a bit of a crush on smooth academic careerist Crispin Willoughby but (spoiler alert) it takes an unexpected turn.

Stibbe’s talent is for depicting the surreal heights of hyper-ordinariness. Sometimes this feels a bit strained, like a sentence in which the subordinate clauses unbalance the overall coherence.

We need to know more about Norma’s inner life to work out how she reconciles her glittering literary career with ferrying her husband to twice-weekly dogging sessions in a lay-by on the bypass.

She doesn’t feel as though all her reading has given her more than a good job and a clutch of lampoonable opinions. ‘Isn’t it fabulous,’ she says of Rachel Cusk’s latest. ‘So cleansing.’

There are some delicious moments in this book. Stibbe sees all the silliness of modern life and its changing conventions – but she finds so much to forgive and indulge in her characters that you end up feeling positively optimistic.