We are introduced to New York doctor Nicholas and his author wife Emma in a brilliant piece of head-hopping stream of consciousness - it reminded me of Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf and the 'falling' leitmotif is also appropriate - as they sit in a fashionable restaurant. The first part of the narrative then settles mostly into Emma's perspective as she shepherd's her young son, little Nicky, around town. She has developed writer's block and is worried about something falling on her head.
The couple are famous for their seasonal parties but an error is dispatching invitations leads to upset and angry words from one of the couples they are friendly with. They decide to forgo a party and the rumour mill sends their reputation into a nosedive.
In the second part of the narrative, set two years later, little Nicky wanders around New York alone with the money from his birthday.
It is a tiny novella, beautifully written, which explores how life's happiness can pivot on the most trivial of fulcra.
Selected quotes:
- “So this is how people feel, we're making something here, the stuff of popular song and lyric poetry, and it may not be the opera I was expecting, and dreading, but there's something said for the manufactured pop song, its reliability, its form that we know so well, time for the chorus again now, but instead it's still at the bridge, which seems to go on forever.” (pp 17 -18)
- “It's like listening to jazz, but not the freeform stuff in which the listener is the performer’s victim, condemned to applaud wherever whim and virtuosity take them; here the listening is equal, part of the show, a spontaneous interaction, your self, my self, this place, your idea, our breaths, her fancy, her imagination, this sunshine, my ears, her kindness, her generosity, she is embodying something, giving flight to a shared endeavour.” (pp 18 - 19)
- “Children and doormen and barbers mostly have names that end with y, whereas parents never do.” (p 23)
- “Things tremble. She can see the vibrating edges of objects that she had previously assumed to be stable. Lines are liquid, everything shimmers as if just about to dissolve. Planes she had previously thought to be solid are, she discovers, made of light ready to merge. For so long she had assumed things were fixed, but they are not, it is all pure unstable energy on the point of collapse.” (p 35)
- “She is not taken away, she is not mistaken for a mental case, she is not dumped into the poor ward along with all the other lost matrons, the estrogenal detritus of the five boroughs, dried out, used up, nuts, sedated and strapped and self-soiled ...” (p 41)
- “The man talking to him is sprawled at the base of the low wall that separates the sidewalk of Central Park South from the Park itself. It is as if he had been dropped there and hasn't troubled to reorganise his body from the fall. He looks both utterly at ease and terribly uncomfortable.” (p 63)
Beautifully written and poignant
May 2026; 75 pages
First published in 2026 by Salt publishing
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