DARTMOUTH PARK

A novel that turns a midlife crisis inside out, rewardingly.

Philip Notman is an ordinary academic, a historian returning home to London (and to his wife and a somewhat troubled 19-year-old son) from a conference in Norway, when he endures a psychological break that’s triggered by the simple detail of someone pressing a travel card to a reader on a tram. Feeling staggered, alienated, dislodged from his ordinary life and responsibilities, Notman decides to head to Spain for an indefinite stay...in pursuit, it seems, of a woman he met at the conference and had a couple of erotically charged interactions with. But Philip's half-conscious attempt to lay off his fugue state on that kind of familiar crisis founders. What he's suffering, he decides, is something more akin to “civilization sickness,” a collapse and inability to make sense of the expectations and demands of consumerist culture. He leaves Cádiz for a remote village in Crete where—having lost or cast off his phone, internet, language, etc.—he tries to reconnect with nature, simplicity, everyday joys. Eventually things curdle there, and when he’s turned away from an abbey in which he’d hoped to find refuge, Philip limps back to London, where he lodges first in a soulless chain hotel and then in a construction-site caravan where, as things grow ever grimmer and more disturbing, he begins to record a video “Notmanifesto” and plan a fateful act of sabotage. The book’s form, too, is fragmentary—it's made up of fleeting, sidewise musings, of phrases and impressions rather than of sentences (there’s not a single period). This may sound unpromisingly inward or familiar, but the result, in Thomson’s expert hands, is fast-paced and headlong; the book ends up rewiring the reader’s sense of what’s banal and what’s not.

A work about estrangement and solitude that’s surprisingly rapid, engaging, light-footed.