Nina Stibbe - "England's greatest living comic novelist"?

I wonder if anyone ever went to a creative writing class proposing to write a comic novel. I didn’t think that creative writing and comic novels could be so opposed, until I read Nina Stibbe’s Reasons to be Cheerful (2019), which tries to be both at the same time. Behind a mask of comic fiction, I sense a sensitive soul trying to escape, dreaming of self-expression, as you would from a creative writing class in which you want to state significant things.

What made me think it was a comic novel? The TLS, no less. In a review by Ian Sansom, entitled “Bantz vs. humour: Differing approaches to the comic novel”, he compares her to other recent comic writers and states “she is in a different league”. In this novel, “Stibbe establishes herself as England’s greatest living comic novelist.” That’s good enough for me! I sat down to split my sides with laughter at Stibbe, twice shortlisted for the Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction. After all, David Lodge would be a good candidate for the role of greatest living comic novelist, and I found his novels hilarious.

I didn’t laugh. The novel, very unexpectedly, moved steadily away from the comic, to domestic tragedy. I haven’t read all of Wodehouse, but I don’t remember any of the major characters dying by accident three quarters of the way through the book. It kind of takes away the laughter, somehow – call me a curmudgeon if you like. Not only is a major character killed, but the rest of the novel describes the narrator coming to terms with it. I’ve never seen a comic novel moving to emotional self-examination.

The comic aspect is quite formulaic. The narrator, Lizzie Vogel, aged 18, gets a job as a dental nurse. She recites very convincingly all the dental characteristics of people she meets. At the same time, she claims to base her ideas on popular women’s magazines such as Woman’s Own. So, throughout the novel, we see trade names liberally used and mindless advertising slogans as part of the narrative. It’s not very funny. In fact the narrator – or Stibbe’s – approach to characterization is simply accretion, piling up personal idiosyncrasies, phobias, product preferences, and odd eating tastes, until we have some image for each character, based on their tics and consumption habits. Advertising slogans are used throughout in seeming belief:

I … stayed for dinner and watched a hard-hitting TV documentary.

If this is satire, then the character is a cipher. But if we are to believe the character, does she believe these publicity slogans? I suspect Stibbe is attempting to use cliché to arouse our sympathy and empathy with the character - which is ambitious, but not very comic. How else could you read this passage, near the end of the book, that is, in the 'emotional' part:

It struck me that I’d started to prefer the top half of a slice of bread to the bottom half. This hadn’t been a whim; I’d always eaten the crusted top half of a slice of toast, to get it out of the way before enjoying the softer underneath half. And now it was the other way round. It was a shocking realization. What had made me change? I don’t know – perhaps I was eager to change as many things as possible. I’d known sadness before, I’d seen it, but I’d not experienced the sort of pain that makes a person switch sandwich preference.

I’m prepared to read the first sentence as funny, but the paragraph moves towards the confessional. It’s as if Michael Frayn in the last act of Noises Off started to reveal his inner emotions when he wrote the play. But we, the viewers, aren’t interested, and mercifully the farce simply becomes more farcical than ever. Nor, I suspect, does P G Wodehouse go in much for genuine self-examination. I’m quite happy for Jeeves and Wooster to remain ciphers. It’s funnier that way.