I wonder why the reviewers say this book is "hilarious"? Perhaps they didn't read it? It's about a woman having a breakdown because she has been weak for too long, and she wants to change. Of course, it's quite farcical, in that this situation (woman afraid to get out of bed) would not be tolerated by a real life family. I don't think so. I think Sue Townsend must have started it to see where it would go, and used her intuition to decide how it would develop. I think that's why it feels truthful. I found that the Guardian reviewer felt, like me, that it was not so much hilarious as "dark".
The thing is, that going to bed and doing nothing is not a good treatment for a life crisis. I was thinking about the film "Wild" in which the female protagonist goes for a long walk. Travel is generally healing, but stasis is stasis and this is one of the truths of the narrative.
Eva, the woman of the title, decides to get rid of all her possessions, including Billy the bookcase and all her books, which she is attached to, but she tells her new friend, the decorator, that she has always used books as an anaesthetic. Ha!! Yes!! She wants to be rid of them to see what life is like with no rushing about, no work, no books, just thoughts. I am rather in favour of this. Sometimes I am terribly tired and I find myself doing, and thinking, nothing, but this is not the same as just looking inward to find out if there is anything in there. In here. Either way. Or letting one's thoughts go for a walk.
Townsend's fiction has often hinted at a darkness beneath the humour, but this novel gives it freer rein than previously. Eva begins her retreat as a fairly typical fed-up housewife, sick of being over-used and under-appreciated, at once liberated and made redundant by the departure of her children, keen to revivify the brain that seems to her like a "poor thing ... huddled in a corner, waiting to be fed". She ends it as a far more radical figure – not quite the messiah that the distressed and needy masses who begin to gather beneath her bedroom window hope for, but a character compelled to dispense with all forms of consolation and comfort while she examines the basis of her life. It is, consequently, an occasionally ragged book, its comic touches dissipated by lingering moments of bleakness. It doesn't seem out of place when Ruby tells her daughter that she occasionally looks forward to death: "I'm tired of living down here since everything went complicated."
Two books hardly make a literary trend, but it's interesting that Ali Smith's most recent novel, There But For The, also featured a protagonist who refused to come out of a bedroom. What unites these vastly different books is how cleverly they both explore the immense power someone who decides to halt their story suddenly acquires, and the unexpected shapes that people make around these human-shaped absences. In Eva Beaver's case, once she's opted for a life lying down, what surprises both us and her is not that she's there, but that we haven't, as it were, all joined her.
