EITHER SIDE OF WINTER
by Benjamin Markovits
Faber £10.99, 192 pages

Benjamin Markovits is a connoisseur of disappointment. In his first novel, The Syme Papers, the central characters are generously proportioned failures: Douglas Pitt, an American academic holed up in a shabby flat on the Caledonian Road, is trying to write the book that will earn him tenure back at the University of Texas in Austin. He takes as his subject Samuel Highgate Syme, an obscure 19th-century geologist and inventor ridiculed by his contemporaries, whom he believes to have been the first proponent of the hypothesis of continental drift. Pitt is convinced, wrongly as it turns out, that writing up this intuition will secure his own reputation as well as rehabilitating Syme’s.

The Syme Papers is an acute treatment of the psychology of frustrated genius and intellectual hubris in the guise of a sprawling, vivid quasi-historical novel. Though no less scrupulously attentive to the rhythms of frustrated ambition, Either Side of Winter, Markovits’ second novel, is altogether quieter and smaller. The action, such as it is (there’s not really much of a “plot” to speak of), is confined to a tightly demarcated patch of uptown Manhattan and a high school in the Bronx. And where The Syme Papers is, in part, an experiment with voice - it has two first-person narrators - this new book is distinguished principally by the richness and precision of its descriptions.

Markovits is a poet as well as a novelist. And it shows. For instance, Stu Englander, a high-school teacher of English, reflects that the beauty of one of his students, Rachel Kranz, “suffered somewhat from a certain fullness around the cheekbone, a rounded edge liable to fattening... By contrast, the angle formed by the line of her nose and the curve of her brow was almost too perfect, too doll-like; too fine a structure to bear the weight of real sensuality.”

There’s a whiff of Updike in this strenuous noticing. But, unlike Updike, for whom the world is mostly a welcoming plenitude, Markovits’ characters experience it as something hard and intractable; they are either “trapped in [their] movements” or else “flaccidly” (the word is wittily applied to a teacher of biology) resigned to an ordinariness for which their education had not prepared them.

Either Side of Winter is made up of four carefully linked stories spanning a single year. In the first story, “Fall”, Amy Bostick, a rookie teacher, arrives in New York from the Midwest to start a job at the high school hard by the subway station at 242nd Street in the Bronx. She is accompanied by her father Jack, who wears his dissatisfaction in a thickening belt of fat around the waistline and whose sense of disappointment is inflamed by returning to a city he’d left 30 years before. Jack remarks to the super in Amy’s building that “God did he wish it was him” who was starting out in New York rather than his daughter. When Jack heads home and she is left alone in her rundown apartment, Amy is saved from the quiet anomie to which her middle-aged colleagues have surrendered by an affair with Charles Conway, the son of one of the school’s wealthy benefactors.

Charles, like Amy’s well-to-do pupils, lives a life of unhurried ease, the kind to which the teachers have long since stopped aspiring. He is unusual in this story, and indeed in the novel as a whole, in feeling comfortable in his own skin. Yet Markovits is not afraid of allowing his other characters occasionally to enjoy the compensations of domesticity or companionship - and he is too careful and too intelligent a writer for this to seem merely sentimental.

In the third story, “Spring”, Stu Englander is stuck in a mostly chaste marriage to Mary Louise, whose fattening, like Jack’s, is a sign not of appetite but of exhaustion. Embarrassed by this woman who, when they are in restaurants together, has the habit of roughly co-opting lone diners into their conversations, Stu allows himself to fantasise about Rachel Kranz when she gives in a surprisingly good essay on Hamlet.

Despite his assiduous cultivation of her, Rachel, too, is a disappointment; her commitment and attendance dwindle for reasons that are opaque to Stu and only become clear in the final part of the novel, told from her point of view. Stu’s story ends with him, aroused by a dream about Rachel, being relieved by his wife: “It is true, he thought, her sympathies are large, consoling.” And this ending is moving precisely because we know enough to suspect that the consolation will only be temporary.

Near the end of the book, Rachel, who is nursing her sick father, notices how, after a feverish reading jag, her language has become “richer, subtler”. This splendid novel is evidence that something similar has happened to Benjamin Markovits’ prose, which now bristles with what T.S. Eliot identified as the prerequisites of a good style: “precision in the use of words and relevant intensity”.