I have been reading Tessa Hadley’s new novel Late In the Day for the last week or so. At about the two-thirds mark last night, I decided to give up and move on to the next book in my to-be-read pile.
The characters in Late In the Day are all irritating and their problems were not interesting. Making matters worse, I found Hadley’s narrative style to be overly documentarian; I kept thinking of John Cale’s narration of the story of Waldo and Marsha in The Velvet Underground song “The Gift”.
Life is too short to spend time finishing a novel I don’t like just to say that I have finished it.
Next up: The Witch Elm by Tana French.