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Toby Litt’s latest novel, originally published online via Substack, is a hugely readable achievement. Across nearly 400 pages, A Writer’s Diary charts the life of a man over the course of a year. Animated by the steady approach of two classic intersecting narrative themes, birth and death, the novel’s architecture is relatively conventional, as its protagonist, a writer named Toby Litt, navigates the emotional impact of these two life events.
Litt comes across as a writer who shies away from demonstrativeness; his approach to letting deep feeling land is defined by a Chekhovian taciturnity that doesn’t always emotionally engage the reader. However, his novel is not about these bedrock life events, not really, and the restraint with which he articulates them leaves space for a different exploration. At the level of narrative, the book documents a couple’s journey towards parenthood, a vulnerable process after three previous miscarriages, contrasted with the narrator’s slow loss of his mother to cancer. These simple, tectonic movements play out with a kind of tidal inevitability, but the surface of the book is preoccupied with something entirely different. Toby (the protagonist, rather than the author of the book) is given a diary by his partner for Christmas, and writes in it daily. Thus the novel chronicles the way huge life events are parsed out into days; their impact on a consciousness that remains quotidian, tied to routine, preoccupied with anxiety and pencil sharpening and work, even as it is swelled and rocked by life and death.
The result is an inquiry into form that seeks to test what shapes a novel can inhabit. If fictional structures are models for thought, and models for thought are models for life, A Writer’s Diary asks: what happens if we see our life through the prism of the order it happens in, not through its emotional weight? By pinning his narrative to the rhythms of a diary, Litt is constantly drawn away from the larger emotional picture – just as all of us are, all the time. Hour by hour, our lives are cups of tea and unloading the dishwasher, a rosary of simple acts, many of which we do not give much attention. This insight evokes the close and pointedly humble scope of, for example, Samuel Beckett’s fiction; as with Beckett, Litt’s project is to narrow our focus. “We often spend the least time looking at the things we spend the most time looking at,” he writes – and this paradox, and the attempt to resolve it through attentiveness, is the real subject of his work.
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The result is highly digressive, and occasionally exquisitely tedious: “could I spend a week writing about pencils?”; “there’s more to be said about dust”. But these longeurs are part of a sophisticated riff on the nature of fugue, a structural model brought into language to great effect by the late Belfast writer Ciaran Carson, who is namechecked here. The novel also carries traces of its genesis online. Its whole weeks spent circling the thought of Keats, of pencil sharpeners, of teaching seminars, recall the blogs of Mark Fisher, one of the most interesting writers to have made the web his dwelling.
White male authors, absorbing the lessons of current conversations around appropriation and seeking to rewrite their own place within storytelling, are regularly seen turning inwards at present – writing autobiography or autofiction, narrowing their focus. There is a rich literary tradition of trying to see infinity in a grain of sand, of course. But the present trend is also a response to a specific cultural moment, where writers previously at ease with taking up whatever space they liked in the imaginary world are seeking to reorient themselves. Reducing your horizons to the counting of pens on the desk doesn’t feel like a final answer to questions of narrative appropriation. But it has prompted a stimulating inquiry into how we weigh and value the days of our lives.
