Quiet. Not small.

Nobody had heard of this and then, quite suddenly, everybody had! I'm suspicious of that pattern and I was wrong to be, this time.

A man goes to university to study agriculture, sits in a lecture on English literature, and doesn't go home. That is the whole of the beginning — and the only dramatic event in his entire life, and the novel knows it perfectly well, and proceeds anyway.

What's remarkable is how much pain fits inside a career. The marriage is a disaster from the first month and is never once discussed by either party. The feud in the department runs for decades over something almost nothing. His daughter is taken away from him slowly, in a room, by degrees, without anyone raising a voice. With the time I began to find the quietness more frightening than any shouting would have been.

There's a stretch in the middle, the affair with Katherine, where the prose lifts and the book briefly becomes warm, and then it's removed from him by administrative means. That's the cruellest thing in it and it's done in about four pages.

Nine. Not ten only because Edith is denied an interior life. She's an obstacle with symptoms. Williams is fair to everybody except her.

I sent a copy to my father, who taught in a secondary school for thirty-one years. He rang and said it was very sad and asked whether I was all right. I said I was fine, I just liked the book.