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Louise Welsh
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On the plus, Glass writes well and I have read some of his other stuff which I've liked e.g. Dougie's War, which I thought was very good, albeit a bit short.
I'm not spoiling the plot by saying that Glass's characters live neither happily nor miserably after. Glass somehow manages to capture that slightly underwhelming, messy, sometimes-disappointing-but-you-can't-put-your-finger-on-it aspect of living. Gentle existentialism you might say. Abe, the main character, is thrown into the world and is faced with its absurdities, but No Fireworks doesn't jump up and down on your head with angst. Like all of us, Abe glimpses these absurdities (when seeing his daughter-in-law run out on her family leaving only a list of demands, speaking to his rabbi in the middle of the night, or having the world explained to him by earnest teenage Christians in a charity shop), before they fall from his grasp as they become part of the indistinguishable morass of things that are normal. Glass's hero does little more than bumble along, generally failing to escape habits of thought and action that characters in lesser novels infuriatingly throw off in moments of unrealistic epiphany. In other words, Glass has Abe do what we do: try to impose meaning in an up-and-down world, and largely fail.
The book isn't perfect- some phrases feel constructed (whereas truly great writing makes you wonder how one could ever write the particular content in any other way) but the style is still fresh enough to surprise and even delight at times. Indeed, and not only because it touches on Jewishness but for its feel as well, No Fireworks reminds me of Mordecai Richler's work.
Anyway, it went down very well indeed in an armchair in the sun on a summer's day.
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