The Sweet Shop Owner

Review ebook The Sweet Shop Owner

For many couples, small physical signs of affection — the eye contact, the hugs, the waist squeezes, the butt pats — come as easily and thoughtlessly as breathing. For an unfortunate few, though, perhaps due to traumatic incidents in their pasts, the idea of casually touching someone, even one’s spouse of many years, causes them to seize up, to panic. The irony is that these people may love their partner with greater-than-usual intensity, given the cost of that love to both of them.

This is a r For many couples, small physical signs of affection — the eye contact, the hugs, the waist squeezes, the butt pats — come as easily and thoughtlessly as breathing. For an unfortunate few, though, perhaps due to traumatic incidents in their pasts, the idea of casually touching someone, even one’s spouse of many years, causes them to seize up, to panic. The irony is that these people may love their partner with greater-than-usual intensity, given the cost of that love to both of them.

This is a really, really sad book.

I met her here those first times, Dorry; here on the common. She looked as though she were lingering on some errand. And up there, at St Stephens, you were christened, and your grandfather, whom you never saw, was buried, near the plaque to his already dead son. We never moved out of these narrow bounds. Born here, schooled here, worked here. And even when I met her I stood here on the common and thought: enough, everything is in its place, and I in mine.
In simple books, a marriage is a union of two people. In a complex book like this one, a marriage is like two neurons touching inside a brain, a link that branches out in both directions, sending currents forwards, backwards and sideways, and nothing can be truly contained between the two principal actors.

This is the fourth novel I’ve read by Graham Swift, and the third that has left me deeply changed. It was not as well-written as Waterland (though to be fair, neither is anything else I’ve ever read), but was still a painful gut-punch. I found it more powerful than the Booker-Prize-winning Last Orders, though. Let me take a moment to note that this was his first novel, that he was thirty-one when it was published, which likely means he was in his mid to late twenties while writing it. In the space of 220 pages, a world is created and populated with sympathetic but damaged souls, and a tale is vividly told. On the bell curve of human achievement, this man is way, way off to the right someplace, all by himself.

The main character, Mr. Chapman, is running a race in high school:
Keep your eye on the landmarks as you round the bends: St. Stephen’s spire; the back straight; the clock-tower; into the home straight. That’s the trick of it. ‘Not paying attention again Chapman!’ But, didn’t he see, that’s precisely what he was doing? Looking at things that were fixed while you moved yourself. That was how you endured.
I’m going off to curl up in the corner and stare into space for a while. …more