Ordinary People
Author: Diana Evans
Publisher: Liveright
View on Goodreads
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Cover Description
Diana Evans, author of the prize-winning 26a, returns with an intimate portrait of London, an exploration of modern relationships and black identity, and that mid-life moment when a gap emerges between who we think we are and who we are becoming.
Melissa and Michael, a couple of thirteen years, have taken up residence in a crooked house in the south of the city, a new baby making them a family of four. Feeling defined solely by motherhood, Melissa's need to reclaim her identity is spilling into resentment at her partner and a growing fear that something unnatural is living in their home. Her solace in her Nigerian mother's stews and spells only infuriates Michael, who desperately misses the excitement of their lives before children.
Further south, in the suburbs, Damian and Stephanie enter a year of marital disquiet. Damian's Trinidadian political activist father has died, and he finds himself adrift and hungering for the city--just as his admiration for Stephanie's wholesome aspirations and white middle class upbringing begin to feel more like a trap than an escape. With the election of Barack Obama posing a distant perfection to which modern couples might aspire, these two ordinary partnerships collide and conjoin in a building chaos born from their extraordinary desires.
Ordinary People is an intimate, immersive study of identity and parenthood, sex and grief, friendship and aging, and the fragile architecture of love. With its distinctive prose and addictive soundtrack, it is the story of our lives, and those moments that threaten to unravel us.
TL;DR Review
Ordinary People is poetic yet scathing, showing us the messy sides of love, parenthood, partnership, and self.
For you if: You like multi-character, character-driven literary fiction.
Full Review
“The arms of their coats were touching, which didn’t seem a thing. They blew up at the sky, the skeletal aerials and the silhouettes of the chimneys. Long clouds lay out, some moving and pink and slipping away, and at one end, to the south, the mood slid full, round and golden into a case of silver wisps, until it was swallowed, whole, and all that was moving was a fading glow like a sun reduced to a common star. A bay tree, blackened in the darkness, stood up above the fences, watching over them with its still, black leaves.”
Ordinary People was my last read from the 2019 Women’s Prize shortlist, and I wasn’t disappointed! This book has mixed reviews on Goodreads, and I can understand why it isn’t everyone’s cup of tea — it’s pretty literary and very character-driven (rather than plot-driven). But the prose was outstanding, and if you like books like that, you’ll like this one.
This is a book about two sets of parents, all friends. Both live (or recently lived) in London, both have two children, and both have seen the flame in their relationship go out. Both of them are navigating around one another, together with one another, and fiercely independently as themselves in order to try to figure out a) where their real selves lie underneath the lives they built, and b) whether they can find their way back to what they once had as a couple. It’s a tumultuous journey, to say the least.
I do have to admit that until the ending, I thought this book was going to fall into a “pretty good” category for me. I was enjoying it, chugging along, but not blown away. But there’s a chapter near the end that was particularly outstanding and brought everything together in a way that tipped it into the “veryyyy good” category.
Diana Evans does such a good job bringing these people to life. They were all round, flawed characters that I rooted hard for. And the thing was, they were rooting for each other too — they just couldn’t quite get there. Which I think is much, much more interesting that characters pitted against one another. She really makes you think about identity, independence, communication, and the need to be open enough to see the other person clearly, too, if a relationship is going to survive forever.
This book felt like what I really wanted out of An American Marriage. I liked that book fine, but Ordinary People just had so many more elements of what I love about literary fiction. If you usually gravitate more toward contemporary fiction, though, you’d probably prefer An American Marriage. But both are very good.
CONTENT Warnings
Infidelity
Pregnancy / childbirth
Gang violence / murder of a child
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