351- ] English Literature - Jon McGregor

351- ] English Literature

Jon McGregor 

So Many Ways to Begin (2006)

Jon McGregor

Bibliography

McGREGOR Jon [1976-] Novelist. Born in Bermuda. Novels So Many Ways to Begin (2006: longlisted for the 2006 Booker Prize for Fiction); If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things (2002: winner of a 2003 Somerset Maugham Award and the 2003 Betty Trask Prize for Best First Novel; shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book, Eurasia region, and the Best Newcomer in the 2004 British Book Awards; longlisted for the 2002 Booker Prize for Fiction)

Description

David Carter cannot help but wish for more: that his wife Eleanor would be the sparkling girl he once found so irresistible; that his job as a museum curator could live up to the promise it once held; that his daughter's arrival could have brought him closer to Eleanor. But a few careless words spoken by his mother's friend have left David restless with the knowledge that his whole life has been constructed around a lie.

Jon McGregor, whose first novel was the acclaimed If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things (2002), turns thirty this year, though you wouldn’t know it from So Many Ways To Begin. Merely at the level of physical description McGregor seems to know what it feels like not just to be far older than he is but to have become far older. The action of So Many Ways To Begin takes place over several decades; characters age, wither, die. Not even John Updike – whose adjectival roguishness McGregor shares – can compete. It took him thirty years and more to anatomise a similar time-span in the life and death of Rabbit Angstrom.

Not that McGregor’s hero, David Carter, is anything like Updike’s. For one thing, he’s rather more uxorious. Even though his wife Eleanor descends into a catatonic withdrawal after the birth of their daughter Kate, he resists the blandishments of other women. In one of the novel’s best scenes he visits

Books by Jon McGregor

Jon McGregor is the author of five novels and two story collection. He is the winner of the IMPAC Dublin Literature Prize, Betty Trask Prize, and Somerset Maugham Award, and has been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize three times. He is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Nottingham, where he edits The Letters Page, a literary journal in letters. He was born in Bermuda in 1976, grew up in Norfolk, and now lives in Nottingham.