It Gets Worse

This is a hugely entertaining book. Lezard is, as anyone who has enjoyed his writing as a critic knows, a perceptive chronicler of human strengths and weakness, and so he is with himself. His compassionate decency shines through – as he writes, “other people’s troubles start bothering you almost as much as your own” – and buying this for a Christmas present is undoubtedly the most joyful act of charity that you can perform this year.

-- Alexander Larman * Observer *

Lezard is a magnet for misfortune — his finances, love life and domestic skills are equally disaster-prone, and he shares his book-infested lodgings with a variety of uninvited wildlife. Rueful and funny, this is a book to relish in the comfort of a tidy living room.

-- Jane Shilling * Daily Mail *

Lezard unashamedly takes his cue from Orwell’s essay “Confessions of a Book Reviewer” with its comfortless picture of an ill-paid hack in the mid-1940s, scratching a living “in a moth-eaten dressing gown” surrounded by “cigarette ends and half-empty cups of tea”. Regular readers will be used to dispatches from the Hovel, and encounters with the Beloved, and the Estranged Wife (one hopes that they are sufficiently anonymized). They will also know that Lezard frequently has “too much month at the end of his money”, plus the hypochondriac twinges that borderline poverty and a sedentary lifestyle inevitably lead to. “Last night I dreamed that I got paid again. Say it in the cadences of the opening line of Rebecca. It’s a nice dream, one of my favourites, but sometimes I wonder is it better to have a horrible dream which you are relieved, on waking, to discover was only a dream; or a pleasant one to which reality is an insulting and uncouth rebuke?” This is the true Lezard: not just wallowing in misery, but examining it with the ascetic curiosity of a stylite.

-- Brian Morton * T