Glover's Mistake [Hardcover]

Nick Laird (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0670020974 | ISBN-13: 978-0670020973 | Publication Date: July 9, 2009

From a rising British novelist, an artful meditation on love and life in contemporary London

When David Pinner introduces his former teacher, the American artist Ruth Marks, to his friend and flatmate James Glover, he unwittingly sets in place a love triangle loaded with tension, guilt, and heartbreak. As David plays reluctant witness (and more) to James and Ruth's escalating love affair, he must come to terms with his own blighted emotional life. Set in the London art scene awash with new money and intellectual pretension, in the sleek galleries and posh restaurants of a Britannia resurgent with cultural and economic power, Nick Laird's insightful and drolly satirical novel vividly portrays three people whose world gradually fractures along the ineluctable fault lines of desire, truth, deceit, and jealousy. With wit, compassion, and acuity, Laird explores the very nature of contemporary romance-"The Death of Love in Modern Culture," as David puts it in one of his dyspeptic blog posts-among damaged souls whose hearts and heads never quite line up long enough for them to achieve true happiness.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. It's hard to like a self-appointed cultural critic, but teacher-by-day, blogger-by-night David Pinner makes it schadenfreude-fun when he turns his loathing scope on his closest friends and then himself in Laird's latest (after Utterly Monkey). David, an oafish 35-year-old Londoner, reunites with Ruth Marks, the gorgeous and famous 47-year-old American artist who briefly taught him (and promptly forgot him) in college. David falls for her while she's in town for an artist-in-residence program, but Ruth prefers David's bartending flatmate, Glover, a 23-year-old virgin grappling with faith and the father he's left behind. Though David succinctly lambastes the very idea of love (Information killed it), he plots to wedge himself between Glover and Ruth—sometimes with an epically intense dishonesty. Whether David is saving his sometimes overwhelmingly flawed friends from a tragic error or making one himself—or both—the book offers a bit of twisted redemption in its hilarious nod to selfishness of all stripes. (July)
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From The New Yorker

David Pinner is a lonely, overweight thirty-five-year-old English teacher, who pseudonymously writes a dyspeptic London culture blog, The Damp Review, where he is “unafraid, hard-boiled, outrageous.” When David becomes friends with his former teacher Ruth Marks, a prominent American artist, he senses that “his life had turned a corner,” and when she falls for his handsome young flatmate, James Glover, he refuses to be marginalized. Laird convenes a cast of enjoyably catty art-world types, and grants David, even as he longs to be included, an unsparing awareness of their affectations, “their casual manners and ironic patter, their insinuation that surface was depth.” The attempts at wit mostly fall short, but the cultural insights are persuasive—artistic analogy gives “endless, untrue hope for reconciling everything.” As David’s preoccupation with Ruth and James becomes increasingly malevolent, an archetype emerges: the disaffected blogger, “searching not for things to love but a place to put his rage.”
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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Viking Adult (July 9, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0670020974
• ISBN-13: 978-0670020973
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.2 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (25 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,306,669 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars a yawn that nearly broke my jaw, August 15, 2009

By 

M. Fulkerson (Portland, Oregon) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Glover's Mistake (Hardcover)

(What's this?)

This book was really difficult to finish. Not because it was offensive, or shocking, or I thought that the author didn't have any abilities. It's that the book was so boring in its retreading of so many other stories before it. It reminded me of the show Friends with some cocaine and sex scenes thrown in. Laird tries to shake up what is otherwise an tired old love-triangle tale by attempting to be cutting edge with some vulgarities, but it just ends up being a cliched mess. Every character in the book reeks of pretentious platitudes, and they all send off an air of privileged "me me me" attitudes. This could be fine if Laird would have balanced this with some irony or some distractions that showed these characters for the inept whiners they are, but he never does. They just perpetually spin into a self-serving vortex that makes you want to scream (or close the book forever!)
While I was reading this story it made me think of many other, and better, books about relationships I've read in the past, and by the end of Glover's Mistake I could only think that I was the one who made the mistake of reading this book!

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Witty, at times, but insuffciently so, July 18, 2009

By 

Dave "Dave" (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Glover's Mistake (Hardcover)

(What's this?)

While this book is set, ever so superficially, in the London art scene, it has virtually nothing to do with either London or any art scene. Yes, there are a couple of openings, and yes, there are a few lines of coke, but it's all irrelevant to the story - these people could have been working at a laundry in Des Moines for all it mattered.

It starts out slowly, as the protagonist (David) seems dreary from the first, and nothing changes that. While his internal dialog is occasionally witty, it's at strange odds with his conversation, which is puerile, and often embarassing to the reader.

We're supposed to see this as a love triangle, in which David's unreturned infatuation with the artist Ruth is derailed when she becomes involved with David's flatmate Glover. David broods, whines, and eventually manipulates a destruction of Ruth and Glover's relationship. This might seem sad, except that one doesn't really care what happens to the relationship: Ruth is unsympathetic, and Glover always seems in way over his head.

Glover's mistake, which ends his relationship with Ruth, seems inconsistent with his character and ends the novel on a false note that reflects a lack of imagination on the writer's part.

Miss this.

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Controversy Becomes Cliche, June 22, 2009

By 

Book Dork (Southern California) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Glover's Mistake (Hardcover)

(What's this?)

Glover's Mistake is about the love triangle between lonely, single David, his young roommate Glover, and Ruth, an eccentric, middle-aged artist.

A Few Positives
- Ruth's daughter Bridget is probably the most dynamic, interesting character in the novel. Sassy, rebellious and intelligent she enjoys pointing out her mother's hypocrisies.
- David's bitter sarcasm can be entertaining.

The Negatives
- Controversy becomes cliche; blogging, snorting coke, older women dating younger men, religion, and modern art. Laird is trying too hard to connect with this generation. He instead should have picked one or two and really developed the issues.
- The scheming that occurs in the second half of the novel is contrived and an obviously desperate attempt to add excitement to the plot.
- The three main characters aren't interesting or well-developed.
- Laird is trying to monopolize on the whole "cougar" trend currently occurring. This would be fine if he was being innovative about it- he is not. The relationship follows the exact trend you would expect.

Unfortunately, I was very disappointed with this novel and would not recommend it.