Glover’s Mistake: The title sounds like terse neo-noir, the first of several acts of misdirection in Nick Laird’s second novel. The mistake is James Glover’s, but it’s the result of falling for a trap set by his unconsciously mendacious friend David Pinner. David sees his college art teacher Ruth Marks in Time Out, tracks her down, and mistakenly thinks she’s interested in him. Her self-consciously bohemian fancy is for James, who’s younger, better-looking, and more comfortable with himself. David takes out his frustrations in anonymous Internet blog criticisms. Sabotaging Ruth and James’ relationship is the ultimate form of corrective critique.
Laird’s narration is from David’s poisonously on-point perspective, as perceptive and funny as it is savage. David conducts an acerbic internal commentary from the moment he re-introduces himself to Ruth at an opening. Ruth asks a passing waitress if she can smoke inside, blessing her as a “punk-rock angel” when she gets permission. “The ‘punk-rock,’ David thought, showed Ruth’s age.” It’s the first of many acute but needlessly savage annotations of those around him. By making his protagonist an amateur critic who goes by the too-apt name The Dampener (“his hands, they were always slightly damp and clammy”), Laird is practically daring anyone to find fault with his novel, lest they see themselves in David. Links are drawn between David’s sexual desperation, manipulative personality, self-delusions, and critical fastidiousness. But Laird also lampoons art-gallery openings with an impersonal precision his protagonist wouldn’t be deft enough to achieve. Laird’s authorial voice is just critical enough to suggest sympathy for anyone who conflates aesthetic preferences with misanthropic righteousness.
Glover’s Mistake isn’t an especially ambitious novel—like Laird, David teaches writing; this is another dispatch from the closed circle of slacker academic life—but it’s sharply drawn. Laird learned the art of narrative compression from his two volumes of poetry, and he skips three days in his first two paragraphs without straining. But the title character is weakest, both in characterization and strength. The inexperienced James is handsomer and more self-confident than David, but he’s too naïve to negotiate a relationship with a woman who’s older, wealthier, and presumably more sophisticated. If David is the novel’s anti-hero, he’s also the one who makes getting to the inevitably downbeat conclusion fun, both for his Iago-esque machinations and his perspective. Not precisely an art-world satire, this is best as dark comedy regardless.