The title character of American author Kate Greathead’s second novel is not just a man; he’s an archetype, a quintessence, a lament in human form. Though decent at heart, George is self-absorbed, inattentive, forgetful, clumsy, indecisive and workshy. A philosophy graduate with vague literary ambitions that never quite come to fruition, he gets by on his good looks and family connections. By contrast, his longsuffering girlfriend, Jenny, is competent and conscientious. The story of their interminable, codependent relationship is told in a wry, third-person narrative foregrounding her plight: George’s laziness “felt like a specific kind of male arrogance … in the beginning, before she knew what to make of it, she had found it charming”; “His absentminded disregard for others, his resistance to doing anything that posed the slightest inconvenience to him. It was immature, it was selfish. It was not a good way to be!”
Set in the US during the first two decades of the 21st century, the novel follows George from his adolescence to his 30s, as he lurches from one mildly amusing calamity to the next. After being briefly hospitalised after a panic attack, he is so affronted by the resulting medical bill that he punches a wall in anger, breaking his wrist and necessitating a further hospitalisation. When he earns an unexpected windfall by starring in a TV commercial, he contrives to squander the money on ill-advised cryptocurrency investments. Out on the town, he can’t find his wallet and is sure it’s been swiped, only to later realise he’d left it on his bed at home.
This is fairly tame stuff, although one scene, in which George excitedly wakes Jenny to inform her that he’s just completed Super Mario Bros on the Game Boy, achieves genuine tragicomic pathos: “George proceeded to describe the end of the game: Mario and Daisy’s reunion, the congratulatory text, the spaceship, the haunting melody that sounded like an ice-cream truck. But it was difficult to convey the poignancy of it … ”
The theme – stunted men and the women who dote on them – is timelessly fascinating, and dovetails neatly with the current publishing industry vogue for novels about masculinity. In a particularly pregnant passage, George sympathetically observes a timid traffic warden who doesn’t have the guts to hand out tickets, and is treated dismissively by motorists as a result. Elsewhere he reflects on the shortcomings of his late father, a similarly hapless figure whose marriage was ultimately scuppered by, of all things, a shopping addiction: “There was something deeply embarrassing, disgraceful even, about a man who was so afraid of confrontation. A man who was incapable of taking real action.”
Embellished with several soap opera-worthy subplots involving grief, siblings and family secrets, and set against a backdrop of political upheaval – starting with 9/11 and ending with the election of Donald Trump in 2016, via the Occupy Wall Street protests – the novel occasionally pans out to a more general, gender-neutral hand-wringing about millennial complacency. A minor character muses: “It feels like no one’s growing up … Like we’ll always just be a bunch of kids … And not in a fun, ‘young at heart’ kind of way … In a self-obsessed, spiritually immature way.” While George is undoubtedly a useless boyfriend, Jenny’s enabling passivity is part of the problem.
Greathead is a competent storyteller with an eye for a psychologically telling detail; The Book of George is crisp at the sentence level, and its bittersweet denouement is touchingly rendered. But the characterisation is simplistic to the point of triteness. George registers primarily as a set of recognisably annoying traits: a patchwork creature, engineered for maximum relatability. He’s too hammed up to feel real, and his misadventures aren’t hilarious enough for him to pass muster as a comic antihero. The novel’s plot structure, not so much an arc as a linear litany of mishaps, is somewhat unsatisfying. Dull, coasting failure is a risky subject for narrative fiction: it is by its nature dreary and samey. Plodding along without purpose or direction, The Book of George resembles its protagonist a bit too closely.
• The Book of George by Kate Greathead is published by Atlantic (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
