I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning

December 1, 2023
Working-class Brits in their early 30s find their prospects dimming as they bridge adolescent abandon and adult responsibility. This second novel by a British poet gets inside the heads of five lifelong friends navigating different paths as they attempt to transcend the crumbling conditions of the unnamed town that has profoundly shaped them. Rian has bought his way out, earning a fortune by the standards of those he's left behind, yet he can't quite disconnect from them. Conor is a construction worker who wants to build his way out, with some financial assistance from Rian. Oli is a dreamer, addict, and supplier, doing his best to dope his way out, though some work from Conor provides an alternative. That leaves Patrick and Shiv, childhood sweethearts and now parents of two, whose love and devotion are the envy of the others, but who are trapped by the demands of family and keeping food on the table. The novel opens with a 30th birthday celebration for Oli, a bittersweet (and overdue) rite of passage into responsibility, or at least into acknowledging that their youth is gone. There's a bleakness in looking back, but looking ahead for most of them is even bleaker, though at least they have each other. The alternating perspectives of the five narrators make the novel's construction feel like a high-wire act--a delicate balance of memory, narration, confession, and projection that mainly reads like people talking to themselves. Though Goddard does a fine job of distinguishing each voice, they all seem uncommonly reflective and articulate, even when drunk or stoned or suicidal. There's some qualified redemption here, but the darkness has more pull. Some extraordinary writing about ordinary people.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

February 1, 2024
Five friends who grew up in a nameless English council estate narrate Goddard's (Hourglass, 2023) second novel as they grow apart, reconnect, work and party, and lose one of their own. Sweethearts Shiv and Patrick are still together, raising two young daughters. Rian left for the city, determined to make money without breaking his body the way his father did. He offers some of that money to Conor, perpetually disgruntled and about to be a dad, to build a block of flats in their old neighborhood, where the sad retirement home used to be. Conor hires life-of-the-party Oli, which they all hope will set Oli on a new track--they all love a wild night, but Oli has taken things too far, for too long. Goddard's startlingly truthful sentences and the collaborative narration style, with a few pages at a time from each character, make his sensitive novel nearly impossible to put down, each snippet a behind-the-scenes look at all the others. Amidst the loss, hardship, and heartbreak in these friendships, there is luck and much love, too.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.