This novel is at first slow to engage, seeming strangely thin and banal for quite a chunk of pages, and if that slowness is intentional then the precise intention is unclear. The author, experienced now in this, her fourth book, may mean to reflect the detached way its young heroine, Anita Mostyn, feels about her own life. When Anita sits down on a Bulgarian balcony with a book, the third person narrator observes: "If reading were a destination both into and away from herself, Anita didn't get there." It is not until the story suddenly swerves in an unexpected direction, subverting the "emotionally-damaged-woman-finds-herself-through-foreign-travel" cliché, that we, as readers, are shaken awake behind the wheel and start to pay more attention to the road.
Anita is an immediately recognisable psychological type, the product of a pressurised upbringing. She operates in terms of "self-sabotage" and talks in exactly that kind of psychobabble, to the irritation of her overbearing and intellectual mother, Veronica. Anita's core feeling of not fully "meet[ing] requirements" is described again and again, with wry variations, as when she fondly remembers a pet dog who, expected merely to be "good" rather than "to excel", was the most relaxed member of the Mostyn family. An art teacher once told Anita she "spent too much time trying to be perfect", and her brittle physique is emphasised without spelling out an eating disorder.
This personality type is as accurately and realistically portrayed as every detail in the novel, down to the smell of boiling turkey stock in her aging parents' Hampshire home (a setting described far more memorably than anything in the Chelsea address of the book's title). Yet in real life such self-pitying girls and women are rarely very interesting – largely because of their indirect self-absorption. One of the elements that sets this novel decisively apart from more straightforward genre fiction is its continual commentary on such self-absorption: gradually showing us how little Anita ever tries to imagine the problems of her envied siblings, for example, and constantly undermining her insecure self-assessments by showing the numerous characters who care about her or are attracted to or intrigued by her (right down to one brother's future father-in-law, who has never even met her).
Another success is the book's unconventional structure, which skips around chronologically, without much signposting, in order to make the point, unobtrusively yet effectively, that we know our own lives to be "loops and circles with the centre of the circles somewhat elusive" yet seldom think of other people's lives in the same terms, assuming that they work by a "forward-step model, crossing off the To Do list". Only in the very final passage of the book is Davey's signature obliqueness perhaps taken to an extreme that feels artificial.
The broader ending redeems the novel's beginning and the responses it provoked to Anita as a "type", including a section that rejects the moral reductivism and pat analysis of a group therapy session in which the central conflicts of Anita's life are simplistically debated by well-meaning but clueless strangers. A hilarious detail about the group's facilitator balancing a possibly imaginary lost contact lens on the palm of his hand throughout the sessions, half-blind and distracted, is pure realism and, at the same time, the subtlest kind of symbolism.
