In Driving Short Distances, Joff Winterhart’s second graphic novel, 27-year-old Sam returns home to the boring town where he grew up, following three unsuccessful attempts at university and a breakdown. Long of face and mournful of eye, Sam, whose worldly possessions now fill a largish padded envelope, needs a job that will demand very little of him and on this score at least he is about to get lucky: the other day, a man claiming to be a second cousin of his father approached his mother, with whom Sam will now be living, in the supermarket car park and informed her, unprompted, that he’d be very happy to take her son into his employ. Doing what? Sam looks at the business card his mum has removed from the depths of her handbag. “Keith Nutt,” it reads. “Distribution and delivery.”
And so it is that Sam meets Keith, a character who, as Zadie Smith has already noted, deserves to join Keith Talent in the “short but potent list of great British literary Keiths”. Keith, an older gentleman of “remarkable textures”, has nostrils like hairy caves and fingers like hairy bolsters and he is the undisputed master of his realm, which is… what, exactly? Hmm. It’s something to do with filters. And Portakabins. Sam, though, spends most of his time in Keith’s Audi, observing Keith’s fastidious habits and listening to Keith’s feebly boastful stories, the majority of which involve his former mentor, Geoff Crozier (“As good old Geoff Crozier used to say, every village has its idiot”). Together, they eat a lot of pasties, bought from flirty Hazel-Claire at the bakery.
As the days and weeks tick by, almost nothing happens – and yet, everything does. Slowly, miraculously, paper-thin Sam starts to feel better; he seems somehow to draw physical strength from Keith, even as it begins to dawn on him just how lonely and awkward his boss is: at the bimonthly carvery Keith attends with his men friends from the business world – “a finer bunch of fellows you could not wish to know” – Sam spots him standing alone in the pub beer garden, a scene that will come to feel like a turning point for both of them. Meanwhile, the ball-shaped Keith, marooned in the bungalow of his own masculinity, seems, metaphorically speaking, to be shrinking before our very eyes.
Masterpiece is an overused word in reviews and ordinarily I avoid it with much the same determination as Keith tries to avoid getting crumbs on his work trousers. In this case, however, it is the only one that will do. Winterhart has delivered a perfect book, as good and mostly much better than many of the regular novels I’ve read so far this year. Like his first, the brilliant Days of the Bagnold Summer, its characters are superbly drawn. But with its themes of depression and its tender examination of the ways men talk (and fail to talk) to one another, it has a depth that book perhaps lacked.
Days of the Bagnold Summer was shortlisted for the 2012 Costa Novel award. This time around, Winterhart deserves to win it.
• Driving Short Distances by Joff Winterhart is published by Jonathan Cape (£12.99). To order a copy for £11.04 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
