"Spring" by David Szalay

     I must admit that I had never heard of the English/Canadian writer David Szalay until I saw that he was on the short list for the Man Booker prize for his novel "All that Man Is," which is the subject of long analysis by James Wood in a recent New Yorker. It is, apparently, his fourth novel.


     My DC library had not yet got a copy of "All That Man Is", but it did have "Spring," an earlier novel, which was immediately available, and I read it with great interest. He is certainly a helluva good writer. To quote from Chris Cleave's glowing review in The Guardian (and Cleave is an excellent novelist himself)..."It would be easy to say that David Szalay, the author of London and the South East and The Innocent, is a rising star, and that Spring, his third novel, is a quiet triumph of understated realism, so let's say it straight away, and then get on with talking about how damned good the book is."
    
     But if you are looking for a strong story line, or plot development, or resolution, "Spring" may start to frustrate you: various things happen, various secondary story lines and characters appear and are pursued and described in detail, while developments between the two or three main characters, whose uncertain, on-again-off-again relationships are at the core of the novel, wander along unresolved. The main focus is on James, an entrepreneur and gambler, who made and lost a fortune with the dot-com boom and bust, and his sputtering relationship with Katherine, who cannot quite clear up her relationship with her husband Frazer, from whom she is separated.
     To quote from Cleave again: "Eschewing simplicity and closure on every page right through to this novel's heartbreakingly entropic end, he does readers the courtesy of presenting grown-up characters freighted with layered histories from which they cannot cleanly break, then trusts us to have the emotional bigness necessary to like them."
      Being a dictionary-lover (hard copy: OED Shorter: Random House Unabridged) I felt I needed to check up on "entropic," which is clearly Cleave showing off his vocabulary, while I admit to uncertainty about the word. So, for the OED--entropy is "lack of order or predictability, gradual decline into disorde

     And, of course, Cleave's quote raises the old question on which we may agree or disagree--do you have to like the characters in a novel?
  
      Bottom line: I enjoyed it, but with a smidgen of frustration as regards resolution..