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Glover’s Mistake
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Glover’s Mistake
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Glover’s Mistake
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Glover’s Mistake

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

3.5/5

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About this ebook

From a rising young novelist comes an artful meditation on love and life in contemporary London.

When David Pinner introduces his former teacher, the American artist Ruth Marks, to his friend and flatmate James Glover, he unwittingly sets in place a love triangle loaded with tension, guilt and heartbreak. As David plays reluctant witness (and more) to James and Ruth's escalating love affair, he must come to terms with his own blighted emotional life.

Set in the London art scene awash with new money and intellectual pretension, in the sleek galleries and posh restaurants of a Britannia resurgent with cultural and economic power, Nick Laird's insightful and drolly satirical novel vividly portrays three people whose world gradually fractures along the fault lines of desire, truth and jealousy. With wit and compassion, Laird explores the very nature of contemporary romance, among damaged souls whose hearts and heads never quite line up long enough for them to achieve true happiness.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateJun 24, 2010
ISBN9780007372065
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Glover’s Mistake
Author

Nick Laird

Nick Laird was born in Northern Ireland in 1975, and studied at Cambridge and Harvard. He is the author of two collections of poetry and the acclaimed novel ‘Utterly Monkey’. He currently teaches creative writing at Columbia University in New York.

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Rating: 3.4183673285714287 out of 5 stars
3.5/5

49 ratings16 reviews

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  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Glover's Mistake is a novel about social relationships in contemporary London. It is a small story that suggests the broader theme of fragmented and distorted communication facilitated in part by internet social networking. The characters (especially David) seem to do things in order to talk/write about them hoping that someone, anyone, will respond. The interaction is driven by the need to construct a meaningful personal whole out of an apparent chaos of information and opinion. The characters have disparate backgrounds, represent different generations, and lack meaningful starting points for their social creations, the stories they tell to each other. Laird shows that the foundation of the stories is a developing self-consciousness. Glover is in the dawning idealistic stage, David is in the critical artistic phase, and Ruth is in the reorganization life review period. Laird's very good satiric description of social life in London is reminiscent of Patrick Hamilton's novels, especially Hangover Square (1941). People have a desperate need to get together and talk to each other, drinking alcohol to ease the way. Both authors focus on self-consciousness as an unreliable record of personal psychological development. Reworked and hidden memories create emotions that poke holes in each character's public story. An interesting contrast is that for Hamilton, the telephone plays a key role in faulty story telling while for Laird the internet is an important deceiver. Fans of Hamilton's work will enjoy Glover's Mistake recognizing the despair of the failure to connect. Thinking about the relationships of the multidimensional characters in Glover's Mistake, readers gain insight into their own artistic creations that they present to others rather inconsistently. A surprising thought is that people usually know more about you than you think. Internet programs like Facebook and Twitter foster quick and easy solutions to problems of identity that are unsatisfying all around. A hopeful note is that our personal works of art can improve with maturity.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Books and stories have always sparked debate but the most perplexing “argument” to me is that one where “plot” is pitted against “character development”. Now I wouldn’t put it in exactly those words; character development, to me, is something along the lines of Charles Dickens characters making their forlorn way through muddy, rainy streets, learning a thing or two every now and then.The opposite of action to me, is more like the writer’s personal philosophy regarding his or her subject.Satire is my cup of tea, be it a book full of flashy, hilarious one liners a la Pynchon or a rolling, farcical set up with a subtler punch line as was the style of Wilde or Swift. That said, I understand that it’s not the thing everyone comes to the table for but I don’t think that idea-driven books are any less attention worthy than something that is straight fiction.Why the wind up? Well, I’ve just finished this fantastic little book by Nick Laird. His short take on love and loneliness, faith and friendship is sparse in sparkly prose but certainly not lacking in those questions that drive plot-less books. There is a plot but it’s a fairly simple one. Not-so-hipster professor David is not a terribly attractive character but he represents the part of us that so longingly needs to belong, to love and be loved. While he is not likable, he is lovable, despite or perhaps due to his flaws hitting so close to home. After bumping along as just another city bottom-feeder for many years, he runs in to (or tracks down, depending on who is telling the story) Ruth, a former art teacher from his school days. She is the embodiment of chic New York abroad in London and whatever mild, school boy crush David harbored before, turns into an obsessive devotion. Set on connecting in any way possible, David approaches Ruth at an art show and proposes a collaboration between picture and word, setting in motion a tentative friendship between the two. Of course neither life nor art imitating it works out as planned and Ruth is inevitably fixated on David’s younger, more dashing counterpart and roommate, Glover. Hilarity and heartbreak follow.Obviously, this is not a ground breaking model for disaster but it isn’t in the physical or dramatic adventure that the real action takes place and herein lies my point above. Right off the bat, we play witness to an art opening during which a blank black canvas, only mildly altered and dubbed Night Sky (Ambiguous Heavens) is sold for $950k. Through echos of this snip-it, explorations of pretention, elitism, and art, with an uppercase A, are bounced off of each member of the story.All of these discussions serve to flesh out the book where the plot is absent. The action is in the study; the adventure in the self-discovery. Now, while I have made a case against the plot-driven reader picking this up, I think that I’ll put in one small plea for said readers to disregard that recommendation. Glover’s Mistake, while waxing philosophical, bordering on entering into that very world of Art that is poking fun of, is about the average. It is about the mundane, the banal and the commonplace. Because of this, every reader, plot driven or thought driven, should pick up the book for in its radical expose, it is an expose of the everyman.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    In this somewhat jaded view of love and relationships today Nick Laird creates a less than admirable hero in the form of thirty two year old David Pinner, one time art student who changed course and now teaches English and aspires to be a writer. He shares his flat with James Glover, a twenty three year old church going bar-tender; and whereas James is fit and handsome David is beginning to got to seed. The two men enjoy an amicable relationship, that is until David introduces James to Ruth, an internationally successful artist and his former art tutor. While David harbours hopes of romance with Ruth, she takes an interest in James, and despite the twenty four year age gap, James and Ruth are soon dating, much to David's disgust. However all is not lost as far as David is concerned; he has plans.Beautifully written this a a surprisingly amusing and alluring tale, surprisingly because the characters Laird expertly creates are riddle with personality faults. David is scheming and hypocritical, and displays no loyalty to his flat mate; Ruth is self-centred and while prepared to make a commitment she sees such as only temporary. Of the three James' probably fares best in the personality stakes, at least his failings can be put down to immaturity and inexperience, he is very much a victim of circumstances. But in this cynical insight into human nature who one sympathises with will depend very much on one's own values. Glover's Mistake is a very entertaining read, even though it may be a rather depressing indictment of the nature of human relationships.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I am mildly surprised at some of the reviews here. Maybe I am weird after all. I found this book highly entertaining and I can identify completely with the way that the main character David lived his life as a complex of plotting and trying to maintain control and influence over those around him. This does happen - and in this case it is damnedly funny, heart-breaking and thought-provoking all at once. Almost like a Peep Show style novel this shows human relationships as they are. A highly recommended read!
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    **Slight SPOILERS ahead**Glover’s Mistake is the story of David Pinner who introduces Ruth Marks to his roommate, creating a love triangle that can only end in tears and a journey. David is a lonely English instructor who gloms onto anyone who shows him kindness; he’s been in something like love with Ruth for 13 years when, as his teacher in college, he mistakes her grace and friendliness (and indifference) as a vulnerability he can exploit to pitch his woo. He invites Ruth to his apartment for dinner and she and James Glover, the roommate, hit it off.Ruth is a highly regarded feminist artist, beautiful and aging, and Glover is a handsome young man of 23 who recently lost his baby fat through exercise and isn’t quite sure what to do with the attention he is now getting. When Ruth and Glover develop a relationship, David is left out as the third wheel and loses his chance at wooing Ruth and his relationship with Glover, one of the few people he’s developed any sort of relationship with. As Glover and Ruth grow closer, David is driven underground in a sense- he does everything he can to wreck the romance through duplicity and sabotage, and spends most of his free time venting his spleen on art and love in his blog, The Damp Review. Since he doesn’t feel a part of the world, that he’s somehow unworthy and the world has done worse than rejecting him by ignoring him, he does what he can to knock the world down to what he sees as his level. Laird draws his sketch of these three people in minute detail. There are several really beautiful descriptions, made all the more poignant because they cast a pale glow and the character’s foibles or foreshadow the despair that is coming like the terrible reveal in a nightmare. By the end of the book, even though none of the characters are particularly sympathetic, Laird forces us to empathize with Ruth and Glover because of the destruction David has brought into their lives. What starts out as a romantic comedy ends as Othello. Laird brings off the remarkable transformation because of his own skill at literary design, but he’s too generous a writer to leave us without at least a glimmer of hope that Ruth and Glover will get on with their lives and, with less of David in their lives, might stand a chance.I recommend Glover’s Mistake, though it is heartbreaking.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Randal's mistake was wanting the flavor of Utterly Monkey again. Laird is undoubtedly a great writer, in plotting and pacing (weaker here) and motivation and flow on the individual page. But a book in which every major character is so completely self-deceived is not for me. Maybe you'll love it.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I initially had a difficult time getting into Nick Laird's GLOVER"S MISTAKE. The characters were not richly drawn, nor were they sympathetic. The story is told from the point of view of a teacher who is cynical, rancorous and full of vitriolic rage, overweight, unhappy, and self-absorbed. If it weren't for Mr. Laird's superb writing and trenchant observations, I would have dropped the book entirely. But here is an example of the kind of brilliant observation that kept me going. The protagonist, David Pinner, goes home for Christmas, and here is how the author describes the plastic Christmas tree in David's parent's living room (p. 87): "Since some of the branches had been slotted in wrongly to the metal trunk and were now stuck, it was bush-shaped rather than conical, and bare of decoration but for a single strand of silver tinsel that snaked around it and an angel David had made at school from yellowed card and pipe-cleaners, with a polystyrene ball for a head. The angel had had a cardboard wand once, and over the years Hilda had replaced it with a toothpick, a paperclip and now, rather ominously, a red-headed match."I am glad I stayed with the book. Somewhere around page 120 a true novel gets going. In the first part of the story Mr. Laird is guilty of that English tendency to describe the surface of a character, and then to let that surface represent reality. (In Mr. Laird's own words, p. 127, "...these people, with their casual manners and ironic patter, their insinuation that surface was depth, that appearance was content.") Not only does the novel now supply a lot of the back-story of the characters, but the observations and musings themselves become richer, deeper. And what is mere description in the first part of the book, now becomes action and plot-points. The writing remains wonderful. There is a passage where David lies in the bed of his flat-mate Glover. Glover had embarrassed and emotionally wounded David earlier, and this might be the "mistake" named in the book's title. It is after Glover's harsh words that David is spurred to become a devious Iago, manipulating situations to bring about Glover's fall from happiness to misery. Here is how Nick Laird describes it (p. 153):"David smiled at himself in the wardrobe mirror, then sat down on the edge of the bed...Carefully he lowered himself down on to his back...So this was the view from here, from his bed, from his pillow. This is what it was like to be Glover...Here was his Artex ceiling, the cream paper globe of his lampshade. David turned his head to the right and here was his wall: magnolia, matt, bumpily plastered. To the left, here were his photographs, his books, his clothes; and here was something else, his smell...after he'd come back from the pub, under the smell of stale beer and ash there was a hint off him of forest, timber, sap. And now it came from his pillow. David inhaled again. Was Ruth's perfune in there? Some part per million of the atmosphere suggested her, a citrus sweetness."I became absorbed in the second half of the book, a reaction in direct opposition to my feelings about the first half. It was still not possible to be sympathetic to David; but it is a testament to Mr. Laird's skill that one can understand David's actions, can see why the protagonist does what he does. I suspect that time won't be kind to this novel. There are too many references to events and music and descriptions that won't have any resonance, even a generation from now. The book is very much of one time (2007) and one place (London). There will need to be a glossary, and notes in the back of future editions, to parse and explain a sentence like this one (p. 188): "Rolf was explaining to Glover why 35 mil is still way better than digital." That aside, I still would recommend this novel to a reader who enjoys books on manners, morals and Society. There are so many fine descriptions and observations that it will benefit the reader to make their way to the second half of the book.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Nick Laird is especially skilful at creating characters you can’t help but care about. “Glover’s Mistake” introduces us to David Pinner, a pathetic, lonely man, who has hopelessly positioned himself in an increasingly uncomfortable love triangle. A professor of English Literature, Pinner prefers to analyze and deconstruct society from afar, and regularly postulates about the meaninglessness of art, the unequivocal death of romance, and the impossibility of love.Though Pinner often acts in ways that make you cringe, the very fact that his characters elicit such uncomfortable reactions speaks to Laird’s talent for creating a world that you can’t help but live in while reading this book. Recommended.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Glover's Mistake by Nick Laird is a bruising meditation on love and relationships in modern England. It begins with David, a somewhat doughy and insecure man who meets his former art teacher at an exhibit of her work in London, begins a friendship and introduces her to his friend and flatmate, James Glover. What ensues is a love triangle and distinct satire about romance, culture and art. David is an insecure and unlikeable character, his neediness saturates the novel and makes him distinctly awkward. His adoration and obsession with Ruth, his former art teacher, borders on sociopath as he manipulates and ruins her relationship with his flatmate, Glover. However, the novel works. By making David so unpleasant, you get to the heart of the pretension of the London art scene and what it does to people. Recommended. (Read September 2009)
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    This is a well written book with a very literary feel. The problem, however, is that all of the characters are completely unlikable. I feel a certain affinity for the main character, David Pinner, and I see myself in him a bit, but he draws me in just to make me hate him later. He starts out as the classic nerdy unpopular guy who wants to be a writer. Pinner then turns out to be totally inept with women, becoming friends with the woman he wants to make his girlfriend without ever attempting to do anything that get her to see him in that light. So, instead, Pinner's friend, James Glover starts seeing her and then proposes marriage to her. Pinner spends the rest of the book trying to destroy this relationship until he eventually succeeds at the end. It's not even as though Glover's character is sympathetic. He is unreasonably jealous over his fiance's past relationship with another woman and cheats on her besides, and finishes up his unpleasantness by smacking the fiance at the end of the book.The only message or moral the author seems to be trying to convey with the book is don't trust your friends. Great, thanks for that.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    First off, Nick Laird is a great writer. There were so many descriptions in Glover's Mistake that were both unique and perfect. I would have never thought of a dirty, marked-up hallway as looking like a discarded scratch pad, but now I will never think of it as anything else. (Frankly, it makes the dirty, marked-up hallway I walk through every day seem a little bit prettier, so thank you for that!) On top of that, Laird manages to filter a lot of philosophical discussions of art and beauty through the character of David, and they never stick out awkwardly from the novel or seem to hang above the narration as authorial inserts, as so often happens when a writer tries to inject "thinking points" into fiction. David is fully fleshed out, and that means that you believe in him even as his actions chip away at his likeability. It's a very accomplished character portrait, made more so by the fact that sometimes you sympathize with him and other times you are firmly against him.That said, as a whole the novel felt a bit slight. We've seen this story before--an embittered person takes down a former friend without ever being suspected, in this case because of a woman. And while David is a sort of schlubby, unexpected Tom Ripley, I'm not sure there's enough going on besides the sabotage plot to truly make it a stand-out novel. The small side plots hit dead ends along the way, and while I think an argument could be made that they are intended to go nowhere, that the only thing David can actually control is Glover and Ruth's relationsip, this makes the ending of the book feel a little simplistic and one note. There's also a strange divide of perspectives--about 90% of this book is written from David's perspective, and yet we get one or two small sections from Glover and Ruth at the end for no real reason other than to squeeze as much suspense as possible from the less-than-heart-pounding ending. It feels a little like Laird's cheating in the homestretch because the spare plot led him into a tricky spot. That said, I did enjoy the prose and would read another of Laird's books if given the chance.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Glover's Mistake is about a love triangle between 3 characters who could not be less likable. The main character "David" is a disgusting, selfish, scheming pig. He pretends to be a friend to the other 2 members of the triangle--"Ruth" and James "Glover" all the while he writes terrible things about her on his blog and is so jealous of Glover it is off-putting. I have nothing bad to say about Laird's writing. His characters are very real they just aren't likable. I did not care what happened to any of these people and as such, had a hard time finishing this book.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This was a story about a love triangle between two younger guys and a 40 some year old artist. It was a hard story for me to get into because none of the characters were all that likable. What I liked about the book is that it is inherently modern right down to the use of a blog in the plot and the younger man/ older woman plot line.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Books and stories have always sparked debate but the most perplexing “argument” to me is that one where “plot” is pitted against “character development”. Now I wouldn’t put it in exactly those words; character development, to me, is something along the lines of Charles Dickens characters making their forlorn way through muddy, rainy streets, learning a thing or two every now and then.The opposite of action to me, is more like the writer’s personal philosophy regarding his or her subject.Satire is my cup of tea, be it a book full of flashy, hilarious one liners a la Pynchon or a rolling, farcical set up with a subtler punch line as was the style of Wilde or Swift. That said, I understand that it’s not the thing everyone comes to the table for but I don’t think that idea-driven books are any less attention worthy than something that is straight fiction.Why the wind up? Well, I’ve just finished this fantastic little book by Nick Laird. His short take on love and loneliness, faith and friendship is sparse in sparkly prose but certainly not lacking in those questions that drive plot-less books. There is a plot but it’s a fairly simple one. Not-so-hipster professor David is not a terribly attractive character but he represents the part of us that so longingly needs to belong, to love and be loved. While he is not likable, he is lovable, despite or perhaps due to his flaws hitting so close to home. After bumping along as just another city bottom-feeder for many years, he runs in to (or tracks down, depending on who is telling the story) Ruth, a former art teacher from his school days. She is the embodiment of chic New York abroad in London and whatever mild, school boy crush David harbored before, turns into an obsessive devotion. Set on connecting in any way possible, David approaches Ruth at an art show and proposes a collaboration between picture and word, setting in motion a tentative friendship between the two. Of course neither life nor art imitating it works out as planned and Ruth is inevitably fixated on David’s younger, more dashing counterpart and roommate, Glover. Hilarity and heartbreak follow.Obviously, this is not a ground breaking model for disaster but it isn’t in the physical or dramatic adventure that the real action takes place and herein lies my point above. Right off the bat, we play witness to an art opening during which a blank black canvas, only mildly altered and dubbed Night Sky (Ambiguous Heavens) is sold for $950k. Through echos of this snip-it, explorations of pretention, elitism, and art, with an uppercase A, are bounced off of each member of the story.All of these discussions serve to flesh out the book where the plot is absent. The action is in the study; the adventure in the self-discovery. Now, while I have made a case against the plot-driven reader picking this up, I think that I’ll put in one small plea for said readers to disregard that recommendation. Glover’s Mistake, while waxing philosophical, bordering on entering into that very world of Art that is poking fun of, is about the average. It is about the mundane, the banal and the commonplace. Because of this, every reader, plot driven or thought driven, should pick up the book for in its radical expose, it is an expose of the everyman.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    With the sheer number of stories that have been built upon the love triangle premise, it's a testament to Nick Laird's talent that Glover's Mistake manages to avoid any sense of staleness and pack such a strong thematic and emotional punch. Much of its success stems from the use of well-drawn characters. Ruth Marks is more than your average cougar; this thirty-seven-year old modern artist (and sometimes lesbian) combines a world-weariness with a latent romanticism in a package that's convincingly attractive to men of all ages. This cougar's prey is James Glover, a hunky bartender whose religious devotion and youthful weight problem allow us to believe his virginity has entered the relationship intact. And caught in the middle is Glover's flatmate David Pinner, a thirty-five-year-old English teacher whose romantic intentions toward Ruth are hampered by his balding, overweight appearance. As David comes to realize that Ruth has eyes only for young Glover, he turns toward all manner of devious tricks to drive the two apart. Witnessing David's metamorphosis from a hapless Charlie Brown into a full-blown Iago, and the rationalizations he employs to convince himself that his actions are somehow less evil than they appear, really get under your skin and allow the author to tease out some powerful themes about the demise of love, religion, and morality in the modern world. In a sense, Glover's Mistake is the complete inverse of the ever-present romantic comedy. But that's not a bad thing at all, as this romantic tragedy will linger with you long after you put it back on the shelf.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Glover's Mistake is a novel about social relationships in contemporary London. It is a small story that suggests the broader theme of fragmented and distorted communication facilitated in part by internet social networking. The characters (especially David) seem to do things in order to talk/write about them hoping that someone, anyone, will respond. The interaction is driven by the need to construct a meaningful personal whole out of an apparent chaos of information and opinion. The characters have disparate backgrounds, represent different generations, and lack meaningful starting points for their social creations, the stories they tell to each other. Laird shows that the foundation of the stories is a developing self-consciousness. Glover is in the dawning idealistic stage, David is in the critical artistic phase, and Ruth is in the reorganization life review period. Laird's very good satiric description of social life in London is reminiscent of Patrick Hamilton's novels, especially Hangover Square (1941). People have a desperate need to get together and talk to each other, drinking alcohol to ease the way. Both authors focus on self-consciousness as an unreliable record of personal psychological development. Reworked and hidden memories create emotions that poke holes in each character's public story. An interesting contrast is that for Hamilton, the telephone plays a key role in faulty story telling while for Laird the internet is an important deceiver. Fans of Hamilton's work will enjoy Glover's Mistake recognizing the despair of the failure to connect. Thinking about the relationships of the multidimensional characters in Glover's Mistake, readers gain insight into their own artistic creations that they present to others rather inconsistently. A surprising thought is that people usually know more about you than you think. Internet programs like Facebook and Twitter foster quick and easy solutions to problems of identity that are unsatisfying all around. A hopeful note is that our personal works of art can improve with maturity.