Review of The Flatshare

Note to self: When Janet Mullany casually mentions that she “quite liked” a book, pay attention.

And ps: When she mentions it for the second and then third time, really for no good reason, it’s because she loves it, damn it, and wishes you would get off your ass and read it already, because really, what more does a person want from a friend?

So, yeah, I absolutely shouldn’t have waited (and, to my chagrin and also my delight, waited until she caved and finally sent it to my Kindle). Because The Flatshare is absolutely that good, in ways that make me remember what I love about romance.

Or even that I love romance. For the feeling I get when an author pummels, strokes, or tickles my emotions in just that way and makes me hers* forever. The actual, audible gasp that issues from my lips as the dark moment approaches, followed by my frenzied, speedreading swipes at the screen, because – although I know that Tiffy and Leon will work it out for godssake – at that particular moment I find myself believing that I won’t be able to bear it if they don’t.

Many years ago, I wrote two erotic novels and five romance** novels to try to understand similar twists and turns in my body-mind wiring – the PushMePullYou of lust and fear, wanting and not-so-sure, advance and retreat. And though I still don’t entirely understand how it works, I know it when I feel it, and in these parlous times I’m more grateful for the pleasures than committed to deconstructing them.

Which isn’t to say that I was enchanted by every trope employed in The Flatshare – the precocious dying child, the history of abuse, the elaborately staged accidental naked encounter. But since Leon works in a hospice, the dying child makes sense. The histories of abuse (actually there are two) are dispatched with remarkable speed and lack of sentimentality (in one case in all of twenty words).

And since the book’s premise revolves around a real estate arrangement between two people, neither of whom have enough money, wherein Leon allows Tiffy sole use of his London flat during her off-work hours while he has it during the day (he works nights) – well, of course the naked thing was eventually going to happen. And by that point I’d somehow swallowed the entire premise with all its weird rules (why, again, have they agreed never to meet? And how is it that each of them has spent several decades on this earth not understanding how majorly good-looking they are?) And yet I happily bought these improbabilities and all the rest of it as I barreled on through, sending Janet happy little squeeing texts along the way.

First off because the book is genuinely funny. Quietly, menacingly funny, in sneaky ways I didn’t see coming, and that might leave someone of a different sensibility simply shrugging her shoulders. Like the publishing house – dedicated to crafting, as in “make all your furniture out of ladders, that sort of thing,” which pays Tiffy barely enough to live on – and is called Butterfingers Press? Or, the moment when Tiffy wakes up after an injury and finds Leon looking after her and reading: “Twilight?” she asks. To which he responds, “You went from unconscious to judgmental very quickly there.”

Second because the book’s so full of stuff. Furniture and objets (largely courtesy of Butterfingers, but also in the overflowing contents of Tiffy’s closet, like the purple Doc Martens she’s painted with tall white lilies) but also a web of relationships that amble on at their own pace, often colliding but ultimately finding their contrapuntal resonances when people help and support, recognize and need each other.

Third and finally and mostly because: Leon. A genuinely introverted hero. Caring, nurturing – did I mention great-looking? – but emphatically introverted. Which certainly ought to be a character type I’ve encountered in my romance-reading history, but which isn’t. Because an introverted hero isn’t a broody hero or an I-don’t-want-to-be-my-evil-father hero or an I-never-wanted-to-be-duke-because-why-again hero. It’s something simpler, subtler, realer, and (full disclosure) something I barely understood about my own introverted self and certainly didn’t expect to see so wisely portrayed and explained in a lighter-than-air romantic entertainment.

An introvert is someone for whom social interaction is as exhausting as it is necessary, and who needs the love of someone who understands this about him (or her) and knows how to support the necessity of down time. IRL (or in my real life anyway) that someone may not be as entertainingly colorful, direct, or plugged into a 24/7 friendship network as Tiffy is, but you’re not here to read about my life, but about these lovely, loveable, deserving characters, and how they get what we all want and deserve, in a phrase originated by a thirteen-year-old genius two centuries ago, though her spelling needed to catch up – love and friendship.

And which is why I'm writing this with thanks again and always to Janet.

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*Also, of course, his, as in Nick Hornby, Armistad Maupin, Steven Saylor.

**Actually one was only a novella, called A House East of Regent Street, recently and lovingly reissued and revised.