Constructed in the
form of letters written over the course of more than a year by a
50-year-old London woman to a neighbor who flew the coop, this
Whitbread Prize–winning novel presents a well-to-do woman
becoming unhinged. At first Eliza seems just a busybody, penning "How
could you?" lectures to Joan about leaving her husband and two teenage
children in the house across the street. But gradually Eliza's letters
come to have more to do with herself than with Joan. Eliza is lonely
and purposeless and behaves erratically. Her civil servant husband
leaves her to live with Joan's husband in another part of London. The
neighbors to whom Eliza used to dispense advice increasingly express
concern about her, but they themselves tend to oddness and sometimes
unkindness. Absurdity surrounds Eliza; her only rock is her
relationship with a young man dying of AIDS who names her "The Queen of
the Tambourine" for her earrings. That relationship, of course, is
doomed to end.
As Eliza reveals that she hasn't mailed some of the letters, that she's
never received an answer to any, and even that she didn't know Joan
very well, It becomes clear that she is an unreliable narrator. It's
hard therefore to sort out the real from the imagined — but
what does it matter? The story is about how things look to a woman who
is losing her bearings, and to her it's all too real. As her
self-revelations progress, a protagonist who seemed impossible to like
at the start of the book becomes sympathetic. Eliza's story is moving
and sometimes hilarious. For those who wonder what this book is doing
on an upbeat fiction list, not to worry: Eliza is rescued from the
brink.
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