If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things

October 27, 2003
McGregor's poignant, Booker-nominated debut examines in loving detail a day in the lives of the inhabitants of a single British block. It is a day like any other—a woman prepares breakfast for her family, boys play cricket, a man washes his car—until a terrible accident occurs, which is witnessed by all the neighbors but concealed from readers until the novel's end. Drifting from apartment to house to yard, McGregor reveals the stories found in each: there is the couple who fight bitterly and have brilliant sex; the man with hands scarred from trying, unsuccessfully, to save his wife from a fire; the aging veteran keeping from his wife the truth of his imminent demise. Weaving through these tales of the transcendental ordinary is the first-person narrative of a girl coming to terms with her unexpected pregnancy after a one-night stand. Her lover's twin brother arrives to drive her to her parents, but doesn't tell her the truth about his brother's absence; the girl's mother has her own secrets. McGregor's rapt attention to the exquisiteness of daily life sometimes makes his details ring falsely portentous, and his unwavering focus on minutiae—rain, traffic lights—can be wearying. But as the man with the scarred hands remarks, "there are many things you could miss if you are not paying careful attention. There are remarkable things all the time." This is the guiding principle of McGregor's novel, one that requires patience but yields ample rewards.

Starred review from October 15, 2003
Nominated for the Booker Prize, this first novel has two narratives: first, there's the story of a single day in the lives of the residents of one street somewhere in England, from an old man struggling to tell his wife that he is dying to an eccentric young man who collects errata from the street and burns with unrequited love for one of his neighbors. The second story follows the aforementioned beloved young woman years later, after she learns she is pregnant. From the beginning, it's obvious that an accident happened on the street toward the end of the day, but we don't actually see the accident until near the end, and the two stories each inch closer to the moment. McGregor creates characters that brim with life and substance through exquisitely detailed descriptions of their lives and memories. But remarkably, almost no one has a name. Instead, the characters are known by their traits ("the man with the burnt hands," "the boy with the yellow sunglasses"), exposing both the disconnection and the unspoken intimacy between neighbors. A wonderful evocation of the beauty and horror of the literally everyday.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2003, American Library Association.)