Had I not been reviewing it, there is no stage at which I would not have stopped reading A Book of Memories. I ached not to read it. I would have stopped happily after one page, after five pages, after a hundred and five, after seven hundred and five. My marginalia grew more and more virulently obscene, before finally drying up altogether as I lapsed into apathy. For four weeks I put myself through it; I’ve never felt such a sense of waste when finishing a book. And then, for another four weeks, I was unable to contemplate the idea of writing about it.

It’s hard to say what makes it so prodigiously unsatisfactory: length, long-windedness, evasiveness, over-structuring, mediocre expression, absence of humour, absence of voice, smugness and preachiness, the persistent withholding of such ordinary amenities as names and ages and settings and incidents, a dully and vauntingly cerebral book about bodies (how disgusted D.H. Lawrence would have been with it!), racking up more and more about less and less, semi-colons adrift in bloated and fussy prose. It is a book about sexual disloyalty or sexual distraction, written without heart and, barring two short scenes that are like a dentist’s dream of pornography (‘can swab and scrub the tight yet slippery cave of the vagina’), without sex, as portentousness and delay and sheer dropsy get in ahead of lubriciousness.