Status Updates From A Man from the North

I’m glad I read the first novel(la) of an author I’m very fond of. The book has little to commend it except to see the seeds of the writer he later became. It lacks the later Bennett's sparkle, the narrative arc feels unbalanced, and the main protagonist is neither sympathetic nor excitingly horrid. But it has the trademark realism of carefully crafted descriptions of the minutiae of quotidian life.
Review to come.

AB's first novel, and you can tell. It's short, somewhat autobiographical, and the narrative arc doesn't quite work - though it may redeem itself in the last 35 pages. But there are many examples of of the sharp and sometimes poetic observations of relatively ordinary people and things that he does so well.