Book Review - Turning Thirty
I saw this novel at the Lifeline Second Hand Book Fair the other week, and decided to buy it. Having turned thirty myself a couple of months ago, I was interested to hear about other people’s experiences, even if they were only fictional characters.
A brief search on Google reveals that other reviewers have found “Turning Thirty” by Mike Gayle to be “poignant”, affecting” and “relentlessly funny”. I wonder if we read the same book.
At twenty-nine, Matt Beckford thinks he’s got life sussed. He has a great career working for an international software design company, a New York apartment, and a cute twenty-two year old American girlfriend, Elaine. Life throws him a curve-ball when he splits up with his girlfriend, which prompts him to apply for a transfer to his company’s new Sydney office. However, it transpires that the said transfer won’t take place for three months. So what’s a man pushing thirty to do in the interim? The answer is to move back to his home city of Birmingham, UK, where Matt shifts back in with his parents, catches up with his old school friends, and meets up with his old girlfriend Ginny. Along the way, he ponders what it means to turn thirty, and in particular whether he’ll find his perfect partner. Or perhaps he’s already found her…
I wanted to like this book. I really did. I wanted to find it enjoyable and insightful. Admittedly, “Turning Thirty” reads like a breeze. There’s 350 pages divided into 100 chapters and the language is decidedly “non-challenging”, so one can read it in short, easy, bites.
However, “Turning Thirty” is ultimately a dull novel.
Not much happens. Matt and his friends drink at the pub, they drink at each others’ houses, they talk about themselves and their relationships and reminisce about their school days. With a meandering plot, and little action, this novel quickly gets tedious. In particular, Matt’s incessant musings on turning thirty soon made me want to cry “For heaven’s sake, just get over it!”
Although this was a fairly short book (despite the 350 pages, there was a lot of white space, and I’d estimate this novel contains no more than 50,000 words) there were many scenes that seemed to go nowhere. Matt babysits his four-year-old god-daughter and plays her Michael Jackson records. He goes clothes shopping and finds the shirts too tight. He plays football on a Sunday and gets puffed. He, his best mate Gershwin, and ex-girlfriend Ginny go to London for a weekend but they all feel too tired to stay out late. These extraneous scenes add nothing to the plotline or to character development. They only serve to make the vague point that Matt and his friends are “getting older”.
The narration is also let down because the author breaks the cardinal rule of “show, don’t tell”. Sentences like “The atmosphere was immediately uncomfortable” or “The mood now was less sombre, but more intimate, more reflective - exactly the kind of atmosphere in which anything could happen, but I knew nothing would.” are common. Ideally, Gayle should be portraying this mood through smart dialogue and subtle observations, rather than spelling it out for the reader.
Worst of all, Gayle signposts the “funny bits” by having his characters laugh uproariously at the appropriate moments. This reaches a nadir, when Matt and Ginny play some silly (and, to this reader, tiresome) game based on the TV show “ER” and pretend to operate on Ginny’s cat Larry. “Come back Larry!” said Ginny, rolling about on the floor with mirth. “We promise we’ll cure you!”
Such laughter did not convince this reader that the scene was funny. It only made me think that the characters were either (a) mildly psychotic; or (b) needed to get out more.
There are a few amusing moments in “Turning Thirty”, which mostly come from Matt’s challenges with his parents. Here is a passage that I found genuinely humorous, as I can picture my own folks saying the same thing:
“ ‘Right then,’ said my mum, just after ten o’clock. ‘Your dad and I are off to bed Matthew.’
‘Night then’, I said cheerfully, as I picked up the remote control and began flicking. My dad hadn’t let me anywhere near it all evening.
‘Aren’t you going to bed?’ asked my mum, when I hadn’t moved.
‘Nah’, I said, still not picking up their hint. ‘I’m going to stay up for just a bit longer’.
‘Are you sure?’ said my dad, somewhat shocked. ‘Only it is quite late, Matthew.’
Finally it dawned on me that they wanted me to go to bed too.”
Also entertaining is the recurring joke of having Matt bump into old classmates every time he goes to the supermarket, and the “then and now” comparisons. (Eg “Alex Craven (then, the boy most likely to play cricket for England; now, guitarist and part-time drug dealer); Mark Barratt (then, the boy most likely to be a bricklayer; now, MD of his own building firm and owner of a BMW) and Jane Nicholson (then, the girl most likely to become the most beautiful woman in the world; now, part-time sales assistant in Texas Homecare).”
Sadly however, such amusing moments are far and few between.
Nor is “Turning Thirty” particularly insightful. Without giving too much away, the realisations that Matt comes to at the novel’s end are broad and vague. People change as they get older. Don’t take life for granted. You shouldn’t be with someone just because you’re scared of being alone.
If you’re looking to kill a few hours on a rainy afternoon, and don’t feel like playing Monopoly, “Turning Thirty” may be the book for you. But overall, there is far too much navel-gazing, and not enough interesting observations about turning thirty.
I hear that Mike Gayle has written a sequel to this book - “Turning Forty”. I think I’ll be giving it a miss.
A brief search on Google reveals that other reviewers have found “Turning Thirty” by Mike Gayle to be “poignant”, affecting” and “relentlessly funny”. I wonder if we read the same book.
At twenty-nine, Matt Beckford thinks he’s got life sussed. He has a great career working for an international software design company, a New York apartment, and a cute twenty-two year old American girlfriend, Elaine. Life throws him a curve-ball when he splits up with his girlfriend, which prompts him to apply for a transfer to his company’s new Sydney office. However, it transpires that the said transfer won’t take place for three months. So what’s a man pushing thirty to do in the interim? The answer is to move back to his home city of Birmingham, UK, where Matt shifts back in with his parents, catches up with his old school friends, and meets up with his old girlfriend Ginny. Along the way, he ponders what it means to turn thirty, and in particular whether he’ll find his perfect partner. Or perhaps he’s already found her…
I wanted to like this book. I really did. I wanted to find it enjoyable and insightful. Admittedly, “Turning Thirty” reads like a breeze. There’s 350 pages divided into 100 chapters and the language is decidedly “non-challenging”, so one can read it in short, easy, bites.
However, “Turning Thirty” is ultimately a dull novel.
Not much happens. Matt and his friends drink at the pub, they drink at each others’ houses, they talk about themselves and their relationships and reminisce about their school days. With a meandering plot, and little action, this novel quickly gets tedious. In particular, Matt’s incessant musings on turning thirty soon made me want to cry “For heaven’s sake, just get over it!”
Although this was a fairly short book (despite the 350 pages, there was a lot of white space, and I’d estimate this novel contains no more than 50,000 words) there were many scenes that seemed to go nowhere. Matt babysits his four-year-old god-daughter and plays her Michael Jackson records. He goes clothes shopping and finds the shirts too tight. He plays football on a Sunday and gets puffed. He, his best mate Gershwin, and ex-girlfriend Ginny go to London for a weekend but they all feel too tired to stay out late. These extraneous scenes add nothing to the plotline or to character development. They only serve to make the vague point that Matt and his friends are “getting older”.
The narration is also let down because the author breaks the cardinal rule of “show, don’t tell”. Sentences like “The atmosphere was immediately uncomfortable” or “The mood now was less sombre, but more intimate, more reflective - exactly the kind of atmosphere in which anything could happen, but I knew nothing would.” are common. Ideally, Gayle should be portraying this mood through smart dialogue and subtle observations, rather than spelling it out for the reader.
Worst of all, Gayle signposts the “funny bits” by having his characters laugh uproariously at the appropriate moments. This reaches a nadir, when Matt and Ginny play some silly (and, to this reader, tiresome) game based on the TV show “ER” and pretend to operate on Ginny’s cat Larry. “Come back Larry!” said Ginny, rolling about on the floor with mirth. “We promise we’ll cure you!”
Such laughter did not convince this reader that the scene was funny. It only made me think that the characters were either (a) mildly psychotic; or (b) needed to get out more.
There are a few amusing moments in “Turning Thirty”, which mostly come from Matt’s challenges with his parents. Here is a passage that I found genuinely humorous, as I can picture my own folks saying the same thing:
“ ‘Right then,’ said my mum, just after ten o’clock. ‘Your dad and I are off to bed Matthew.’
‘Night then’, I said cheerfully, as I picked up the remote control and began flicking. My dad hadn’t let me anywhere near it all evening.
‘Aren’t you going to bed?’ asked my mum, when I hadn’t moved.
‘Nah’, I said, still not picking up their hint. ‘I’m going to stay up for just a bit longer’.
‘Are you sure?’ said my dad, somewhat shocked. ‘Only it is quite late, Matthew.’
Finally it dawned on me that they wanted me to go to bed too.”
Also entertaining is the recurring joke of having Matt bump into old classmates every time he goes to the supermarket, and the “then and now” comparisons. (Eg “Alex Craven (then, the boy most likely to play cricket for England; now, guitarist and part-time drug dealer); Mark Barratt (then, the boy most likely to be a bricklayer; now, MD of his own building firm and owner of a BMW) and Jane Nicholson (then, the girl most likely to become the most beautiful woman in the world; now, part-time sales assistant in Texas Homecare).”
Sadly however, such amusing moments are far and few between.
Nor is “Turning Thirty” particularly insightful. Without giving too much away, the realisations that Matt comes to at the novel’s end are broad and vague. People change as they get older. Don’t take life for granted. You shouldn’t be with someone just because you’re scared of being alone.
If you’re looking to kill a few hours on a rainy afternoon, and don’t feel like playing Monopoly, “Turning Thirty” may be the book for you. But overall, there is far too much navel-gazing, and not enough interesting observations about turning thirty.
I hear that Mike Gayle has written a sequel to this book - “Turning Forty”. I think I’ll be giving it a miss.