The Fit
by Philip Hensher
47 Members (3.00)
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Description
From the author of The Mulberry Empire comes a short, delicious, rather disorienting novel about an indexer who wakes up one morning to a Dear John letter informing him his wife has left him... 'My wife had gone and I didn't know where she had gone. It would have been terrible if I had liked her but I only loved her. 'John is an indexer, and a bloody good one at that. He lives in a beautiful house with a beautiful garden, and has a beautiful wife, Janet. (Yes, yes, they are called Janet and show more John. They know. )But lately, things have begun to go wrong. Thanks to his flawless index for 'Haddock: The Story of the Fish Which Changed the World', John has become typecast, and a commission for an index for 'Squid Through the Ages in Poetry and Prose' swiftly followed. And to cap it all, he's woken up with a terrible case of the hiccups, and Janet has left him... Wonderfully funny and light, but ultimately very moving, The Fit is English comic writing at its best, from one of the most talented young novelists at work today. show lessTags
Recommendations
Member Recommendations
KayCliff The sisters of the heroes of both books were raped and murdered when the characters were children.
KayCliff The heroes of both books, traumatised by early experience, retreat into book-centred, isolated careers.
KayCliff One book describes the effect on a family of the murder of a daughter in real life; the other in fiction.
KayCliff The protagonists of book books are professional indexers.
Member Reviews
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Published Reviews
John, the hero of this novel, is an indexer, and as he assures us, ‘bloody good at it’, so that’s what his fellow professionals will want to know about, his practice of his profession – never mind his wife’s leaving him, her journeying and return, her former lover, John’s sister’s wedding, the murder years earlier of their other sister and its aftermath, the German who arrives show more proclaiming his homosexuality and making advances to John, the Indian woman photographer who attaches herself to him, the night club with its drug-taking . . . show less
added by KayCliff
The aim of his novel, Hensher has said, ‘was to subvert the traditional modes of the English comic novel with disjunctures of tone and mode’. Accompanying this aim is a characterization of the indexer as schlemiel – a bungler, or dolt, in everything except indexing. John Carrington, Hensher’s hero-narrator, awakes one morning to find a farewell letter from his wife on the pillow show more alongside his head. Theirs has not been a marriage marked by intimate communication. She has, John notes, misspelled ‘possessive’. show less
added by KayCliff
added by KayCliff
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A Novel Cure
742 works; 23 members
Author Information
25+ Works 2,683 Members
Common Knowledge
- Original publication date
- 2004
- People/Characters
- John Carrington
- First words
- A man who has nothing is nothing.
- Quotations
- ‘I write, or extract, indexes from what other people have written.’ [He regards himself as] ‘a born indexer. You could hand me a 700-page manuscript in green ink . . . a manuscript only a mother could love, a manuscript... (show all) only a lunatic could make sense of. I would return it with an index of beauty and clarity, a clean diagram of the principal points.’
‘I breached – in a serious way – the indexers’ code of conduct. I corrected a mistake. . . . Correcting is not what an indexer does. He does not pass judgement on what he is given.'
Behaviour, bad, by the upper classes, 55, 139–
Bible, relationship between Northern Line and,
Cappuccino, enquiries governing consumption
Cheerleaders, only likeable when incompetent,
Cocoa powder, considered a... (show all)s traffic hazard,
Finno-Ugric languages, unsuitability of for conveying information, 81
Martin Chuzzlewit, 34
concluded to be complete bollocks, 38
Other people’ (what Sartre called ‘Hell’) commit themselves to labour which is anguished; ‘mine is calm. There is a poet called Wordsworth who said that indexes are emotion recollected in tranquillity. Well, of course... (show all), he did not, but that is quite a good thing to say and I am saying it.
When I was a boy, there was a television programme called *Magpie*. ... But this programme's theme tune was the song about magpies; sorrow, joy, girl, boy, silver, gold, secret never to be told - Everyone knows the sequence b... (show all)ut they know it from the theme music to an old television programme. I had no idea whether it was a real country belief, or if it had all been made up 30 years ago for commercial television. It would be sad to think that any aspect of your life, however tiny, was being influenced by a song written in a couple of
afternoons at a London recording studio in 1971.' - Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)It definitely begins with L.
Classifications
Statistics
- Members
- 47
- Popularity
- 636,644
- Rating
- (3.00)
- Languages
- English, Spanish
- Media
- Paper
- ISBNs
- 3
