Toby Litt’s books have always been so markedly different from one another that it’s a challenge picking up the common thread between crime thriller, parody chick-lit, Jamesian meditation and cod-rock-memoir. Yet the characters of Paddy and Agatha keep popping up like fixtures on a dinner party circuit, whose behavioural tics and conversational repertoire one has come to recognise.
The couple first appeared in 2004’s Ghost Story, a claustrophobic narrative in which Agatha succumbed to agoraphobia, having miscarried her second child. Life-Like collects the stories Litt has published detailing the subsequent course of their relationship, which has endured without exactly going well. In the first sentence, the couple’s four-year-old Max breaks his arm when his bedroom door blows shut. Paddy – a philosophy lecturer who was supposed to be on parental duty – knows that the accident is his fault. But he is also determined to leave, as scheduled, for an academic conference in Hull: “The fact that it was Hull seemed to make it less defensible than Glasgow or Manchester. The place didn’t possess any philosophical gravitas.”
The conference throws up an opportunity to sleep with an attractive Indian academic; in the second story, Agatha gets her own back by enrolling on a weekend writers’ course and enjoying a liberating tussle in the woods with the course tutor, whom she has never heard of, but who turns out to be “quite important in the unimportant world of short stories”.
The relative unimportance of short stories is emphasised by Litt’s self-deprecatory statement that one piece here, “John & John”, “won the semi-widely known Manchester Fiction prize”. It’s also notable that the story in question – an interior monologue in which Agatha’s writing tutor attempts to banish pornographic thoughts while listening to a meditation tape – is the most mannered and indulgent episode in the collection; though it sets up a cleverly bifurcating structure in which Paddy and Agatha’s partners meet new partners who each reveal their own narratives and so forth.
This fictional diaspora is disseminated across a variety of different formats. The further story of the voluptuous Indian academic is bleakly itemised in the form of the bill she receives for cancer treatment in Sweden. The Swedish doctor then acquires the leading role in a brooding screenplay containing directions such as: “NYKVIST keeps walking for a length of shot that only a European art movie with a name director would tolerate.” The writing tutor’s ex, “Yaminah the autobiographical-cartoonist-from-Tehran”, expresses herself, naturally enough, in cartoons. And the aspirations of the sister of Paddy and Agatha’s Czech nanny can be encompassed in a single text: “My big dream is live in Hollywood have small dogs like @ParisHilton and producer put me in film so I win Oscar after new breast.”
The most affecting tales turn out to be those which feature Paddy and Agatha’s rather smug friends, Henry and May, who also first appeared in Ghost Story. In that novel, May’s success in bringing a baby girl to full term increased Agatha’s despair. Now their marriage is also in trouble, as Henry, a journalist, succumbs to a disastrously cliched affair with a young woman in the office, while May seeks solace in online computer gaming. There’s a hilarious narrative in which she seeks out a role-playing game that will be as violent as possible: “May wanted killing. Lots and lots of killing. She’d had quite enough of birthing, mothering, caring, loving. It had done nothing but make her unattractive and unlovable.”
May’s avatar forms a close relationship with a warlock named Bloodkill, but has to quickly unform it when Bloodkill’s mother intervenes to insist that he finishes his homework. She returns a few weeks later to discover that the schoolboy warlock has deleted himself: “This had made her cry for half an hour, she didn’t quite know why. The internet seemed to be creating new forms of grief.” Litt’s stories can be a little abstruse and inconsequential at times, but there is hardly one that fails to deliver a small, sad observation of this quality. There’s no question that the middle-aged ennui of Paddy and Agatha and their friends is, at the very least, quite an important addition to the unimportant world of short stories.
• To order Life-Like go to seagullbooks.org
