“Heartbreak has an English middle-class reticence when it comes to the deep exploration of feeling. There is a sense in which the novel rationalises this defect by taking refuge behind its stiff-upper-lipped characters. We are told that people are in love or despair, rather than seeing this in action.

“….The world of this novel is not a pleasant one. It is a sex-obsessed place full of beautiful, genetically faithless people who talk mostly about art and shagging when they’re not saying ‘fuck you’. Friendship in this hermetic sphere is ‘one friend betraying another friend to a third friend’. Happiness and self-fulfilment are for the most part outlandish fantasies. And, as Schopenhauer remarked, there is no altruism. It is a high-minded cliché of contemporary fiction that love is doomed, social hope bankrupt and virtue wet behind the ears. In this context, the most outrageously avant-garde novel would be one in which someone was happy for a change.”

Read this review over at the LRB and considered while reading it Terry Eagleton may well be onto something. Then began to imagine the people who inspired it and boiled the kettle.