Above all, there’s the voice: idiosyncratic and droll, bittersweet and clear-eyed ... Though Susan’s narrative style occasionally finds the novel ambling down cul-de-sacs (suburban dogging being one), Stibbe succeeds in depicting a character who truly evolves over the years. It’s not the crisply choreographed stuff of the classic bildungsroman, but instead a more gradual development driven as much by middle-age’s irascibility and impatience as by youthful dreams ... If ever there were a time for reading Stibbe, it’s surely now. Not for nothing was her last novel titled Reasons to Be Cheerful. And yet while comparisons with Alan Bennett, Sue Townsend or even Victoria Wood remain apt, Stibbe applies her own darkly distinctive touches ... Whereas Stibbe’s previous novels confined themselves largely to the past, One Day I Shall Astonish the World takes the reader up to the year 2020, via hashtags, gender-neutral pronouns and, of course, Covid. It’s here that its tone falters, albeit momentarily. It’s a measure of her skill as a writer that she manages to save the novel. After all, her heroines are used to having, for one reason or another, their prospects restricted, so it’s perhaps no surprise that when faced with lockdown, Susan should at last come into her own, breaking into print in her 50s just like Stibbe herself.
Stibbe has been called Sue Townsend’s heir, and it’s easy to see why. There’s the mining of everyday life for humour, her merciless observations on character, her skewering of provincial, lower-middle class Britain, its traditions and small-town tragedies ... This new book has echoes in literary fiction too ... Complementing, and indeed elevating, this conventional storyline is another about Susan and her best friend Norma, a kind of alter ego who seems, right from the outset, to be living Susan’s best life. This interrogation of friendship is Stibbe at her best – quirky, compelling characters and relationships that seem, on the face of it, not to make sense ... The tension between the women doesn’t ever really resolve and readers may feel short-changed in that respect. The action of the novel is diffuse rather than concentrated, a scattergun approach that suits Stibbe’s style of writing, which is dense with humorous observations and full of delightful idiosyncrasy. Like a stand-up comic, she understands the value of repetition, circling back on jokes at the right time and in a new context, giving readers the old one-two punch of wit and insight with remarkable regularity ... Later sections that chart the pandemic at first seem tokenistic, but Stibbe ties it all together in this moving ode to marriage and friendship, to lives unlived, chances untaken, and the great joke of agency in a world where everything can turn upside down in a heartbeat.
Susan’s travails make for pleasant if inessential reading; but if you approach the novel as Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend transposed to the fictional University of Rutland, with the local golf club standing in for the Camorra, bathos takes on an irresistibly comic tinge ... Stibbe retains her discerning eye for the low-level humour of everyday life ... Emotional turmoil is played for laughs rather than Neapolitan histrionics.
That the lives depicted here are largely unremarkable is deliberate – Stibbe is as interested in the stories people tell themselves as the drama of their reality ... Susan is at once naive and observant, solipsistic and kind. Not for nothing have Stibbe’s books been compared to those of Sue Townsend, a comic writer also from Leicester who specialised in characters who could wryly see the world while struggling to know their place in it ... Certainly, Susan’s idle observations about her 'clinically irritating' sister-in-law, or her husband’s ex who 'once forced a boyfriend to the cinema at knife point to see a film he didn’t fancy' made me bark with laughter ... Stibbe is also queen of the brilliant blink-and-you-miss-it detail ... There are times where it feels as though Stibbe is about to dig into darker territory, particularly in repeated references to Susan’s dysfunctional childhood and her mother having had an accident, after which she developed a West Country accent and would make lewd gestures in public, though these strands are left dangling. And the final chapters, in which Roy is hospitalised with Covid-19, feel like the start of an entirely different book ... Still, no one writes the minutiae of life like Stibbe, and here she has delivered a captivating portrait of friendship that is as tender as it is funny.
... darling ... We assume this goes both ways and start to understand that some people in Susan’s life tire of her constant chatter, which is a shame, because readers absolutely do not. An anything-but-average tale of a thrillingly ordinary friendship, which is to say one that’s strengthening, humiliating, confounding, and cheering, depending on the day.
