Estimated read time: 2-3 minutes
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George, a befuddled retiree, absently wanders home and discovers his wife, Jean, in flagrante delicto with David, his former co-worker. He's puzzled. A bit shocked. Stunned by how unattractive the couple looks naked, in the throes of forbidden, messy ecstasy on the marital bed.
And without ever confronting the lovebirds, he ambles away. Already, he's trying to grapple with the unsavory fiance of his daughter, Katie, the boredom of retirement, and the "spot of bother" in question, a "small oval of puffed flesh" he finds on his hip, which he's convinced is cancerous.
Others might seek therapy. George deals with his fears by hiding under furniture or following his wife from room to room.
Such is the emotionally addled suburban life of George Hall, a mild-mannered man slowly losing his grip on reality. And it's the focal point of Mark Haddon's delightfully touching tour de farce about one pleasant man's attempts to deal with his puzzling family-- fiery daughter Katie, gay son Jamie and cheating wife Jean -- while discovering that his "mind was malfunctioning."
In typical stiff-upper-lip fashion, he reasons, "there was no point in complaining. He had spent his life solving problems. Now he had to solve another one."
A Spot of Bother is the follow-up to Haddon's critically lauded and best-selling 2003 novel, the tenderly, often caustically moving The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, a tale of an autistic boy's attempts to come to terms with a perplexing life he can't quite grasp.
This time, Haddon explores the mundane yet surprisingly droll domestic travails of one very average British family.
As plots go, it's not much of a page-turner per se. Yet Haddon finds magic in the details and, as with Dog, makes the routine minutiae of day-to-day life appealing and often hilarious.
Jamie gets dumped by his boyfriend after hemming and hawing about taking him to Katie's wedding. George can't relate to his toddler grandson. Katie blows up at her sullen fiance for spying on her.
But the observations are so astute, so gently funny, so touching, that you get caught up in the fate of the well-meaning, if slightly imprudent, Hall family.
A Spot of Bother
By Mark Haddon
Doubleday, 368 pp., $24.95
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