Book Review: Ordinary People by Diana Evans
Imogen Richardson reviews Diana Evans’ 2018 novel, Ordinary People.
Named after the John Legend ballad of the same name, Ordinary People considers the mundanities of marital discontent, what Legend refers to as the struggles of keeping a relationship alive “past the infatuation stage.”
The novel is framed by events with global impacts. In the opening pages, Evans describes a glitzy party to celebrate Obama’s election in 2008, and Michael Jackson’s death in June 2009 marks the final chapters. Evans, however, is more concerned with domestic minutiae than broad social drama. Ordinary People focuses on the relationships of two London-based couples, charting the demise of each relationship and the challenges faced in modern marriage.
Stephanie is a practical and self-assured housewife, described as having an “aptitude for contentment.” Her husband, Damian — the aspiring writer turned housing officer — finds the tediousness of family life claustrophobic. Having moved to the Surrey suburbs at Stephanie’s request, Damian now spends his commute day dreaming about leaving his family and building up the courage to do so.
Meanwhile, their friends in South London, Melissa and Michael, adjust to life with a new baby. Whereas Stephanie is a hands-on mother, Melissa is more ambivalent towards motherhood. Believing that she’s been mis-sold the bliss of “creative working motherhood,” Melissa is bored and unfulfilled by the realities of life as a freelancer. Throughout the novel, she struggles to reconcile the tensions between feminism, her desire for professional success, and the demands of motherhood.
Woven into Evans’ discussion of marital discordance are detailed observations that evoke the monotony of looking after young children. Melissa endures the inane chatter of parent-toddler meetings as respite from her crooked and mouse-plagued Victorian town house. Both Stephanie and Melissa hoover in food splattered tracksuits and send their partners reminder texts to pick up loo roll. There’s also an existential meltdown in Pret a Manger.
Evans’ depiction of the banalities of everyday life has brought the novel under much critique. According to Jennifer Reese, the novel is a “rambling, smallish drama” that does not provide a broad enough social commentary. Michael’s short-lived affair with Rachel, a girl from work, has the potential to go seismic but it doesn’t. Instead, insubstantial domestic disagreements gradually build into slow family catastrophes.
However, Evans’ focus on the mundane, trivial realities of our day to day lives is a conscious choice. As she reflects in her interview with Lisa Allardice, Evans writes about the ordinariness of the black experience in order to make blackness visible in a predominantly white canon: black characters in the novel “are not the side character, they are not there as a novelty, they are just the characters. It shouldn’t be a big deal, but it is.”
She is wary of weighing down black characters with the racial history of slavery, migration and subjugation, and therefore reducing life’s complexities to a racial label. She writes about race because it is so deeply engrained in the lives of black people, and simultaneously worries that black characters run the risk of being reduced to their BAME identity.
By writing about the domestic, Evans is able to examine various social experiences. The novel uses race as a platform to explore questions of identity, how it feels to be middle-aged, and the social imbalance of parenthood. Her examination of the everyday struggles that women face, and the way in which modern motherhood can be oppressive, is particularly resonant.
At the same time, Evans does not shy away from depicting London’s gang culture. She definitively sets the hope and empowerment of Obama’s election against the crushing reality of knife crime that has become, to some degree, quotidian in London. One of the novel’s subplots follows the life of a gifted 13-year-old boy, Julian, and the crushing loneliness that his mother feels after he is murdered by a gang.
Ordinary People may be a domestic drama, but this does not limit the scope of the novel. Minute details of marital discordance are woven into Evans exploration of universal questions, encouraging readers to think about the gendered roles of parenthood and the domestic space whilst engaging in cultural discussions of race.