Volume 54, Number 18 · November 22, 2007
The Trouble with Happiness
By Al Alvarez
Tomorrow
by Graham Swift
Knopf, 255 pp., $23.95
When my mother was a little girl, back at the beginning of the last century, she used to hear her mother and an aunt gossiping about an uncle who was having an affair with a woman 'over the water.' She thought they must mean somewhere glamorous, like Paris; all they really meant was London south of the Thames. This is the far-from-glamorous country Graham Swift has made his own. It stretches from working-class Bermondsey to affluent Putney, via Wimbledon, Blackheath, Clapham, Sydenham, Lewisham, Orpington—quiet commuting suburbs, a comfortable distance from the center, where the action is. Even Waterland, the Fenland saga that made Swift famous, ends up in boring Lewisham.
Review, 2139 words
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