A nervous breakdown done politely
A Spot of Bother
By Mark Haddon
Doubleday, 354 pp., $24.95
George Hall is a quiet sort. Happily married with two grown children, newly retired from a job installing playground equipment, he is pleasant and correct in his comportment, a model of British reserve. Then he notices a spot on his hip. Eczema, his doctor assures him , but George is not convinced. His worry becomes full-blown panic; he becomes obsessed with thoughts of death. He fears he is losing his mind, which, being George, he tries to do as unobtrusively and considerately as possible. So opens ``A Spot of Bother," a deft, engaging comedy of manners by Mark Haddon, author of the best-selling ``The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time."
George's breakdown coincides, inconveniently, with a stressful period for his family. His difficult daughter Katie -- ``the only person he knew who could bring up the subject of menstruation over lunch" -- is threatening remarriage to the inappropriate Ray, a hulking man with ``strangler's hands." George fears that his gay son , Jamie , will bring a date to the wedding, an unnerving prospect: ``If Jamie wanted a double bed he would say the spare room was being used by someone else, and book him into an upmarket bed -and -breakfast somewhere. Just so long as George didn't have to use the word boyfriend." His wife , Jean , is a source of comfort, until he discovers her in bed with one of his former co-workers.
As George unravels, the rest of his family barely notices; each is immersed in his own trials. Jean's afternoons with her lover become increasingly difficult to arrange now that George is always at home. Katie has sudden reservations about marrying Ray. And Jamie's life comes apart when his boyfriend dumps him, leading to a traumatic realization: `` He'd end up living with someone else who cared more about furniture than human beings and they'd lead a life which looked perfectly normal from the outside but was, in truth, a kind of living death that left your heart looking like a raisin."
Haddon doesn't set out to plumb the depths of his characters' psyches. His touch is light, his intent comic rather than tragic. The frenetic buildup to the wedding unfolds a bit predictably; what makes the journey enjoyable is the writer's wit. At a friend's wake, George is disappointed by the impersonal eulogy: ``On the other hand . . . no one wanted the truth (`He was a man incapable of seeing a large-breasted woman without making some infantile remark. In later years his breath was not good.')" And Jamie ruminates rather sourly on the difficulties of single life: ``He'd tried celibacy. The only problem was the lack of sex. . . . And there were Sunday evenings when reading a book was like pulling teeth, so you ate a tin of sweetened, condensed milk with a spoon in front of French and Saunders and something toxic seeped under the sash windows and you began to wonder what in God's name the point of it all was."
The genius of Haddon's earlier novel lies in its seamless conjuring of the voice of young Christopher, his autistic boy narrator; yet that book seems to cry out for a second point-of-view character, a lucid adult observer able to tell the parts of the story Christopher does not understand. In ``A Spot of Bother" Haddon charges boldly in the opposite direction by shifting perspective every few pages, shuffling among all four members of the Hall family. For two-thirds of the novel, this approach is quite effective. It isn't until the family converges for Katie's wedding that the frequent shifts become unwieldy and, as the reader is forced to witness each event three or four times, a bit tedious.
The novel ends happily, as such stories generally do. Love triumphs, though not himself: ``Obviously there were some problems he would still have to deal with. But the panic had subsided. He was suffering from eczema. He could see that now." And his breakdown confers an unexpected benefit: For the first time in his life, he is hungry for communication. As his wife observes, ``When he finally fell asleep it was probably due to exhaustion. He hadn't sustained a conversation this long in twenty years." For George, losing it has proven quietly transformative. It has freed him from loneliness. Behaving badly, he has brought his fractured family close.
Jennifer Haigh has written two novels, ``Baker Towers" and ``Mrs. Kimble." 