Smith (Misadventures) uses short vignettes to paint a picture of the year she lived in a bedsit in 1984 London's East End in this peculiar, pointillistic memoir. Four women—Sylvia (the narrator), Sharon, Tracey and Laura—and Sharon's boyfriend, Peter, live in a near constant state of subdued battle as squabbles erupt over noise levels, who used up the hot water and who forgot to replace the toilet paper in the shared bathroom. The writing style echoes the simplicity of the lives of the residents of Appleby House, although the prose is frequently graceless and clichéd: "She walked towards me," Smith writes of her housemate Sharon, "with a big smile on her face and greeted me with a cheery 'Hi.' We were soon deep in conversation." Although the publisher calls this memoir "a very literary equivalent of The Real World," it lacks depth, and the writing keeps the readers at a distance. Smith thoroughly describes buying a used television, where she keeps her kitchen trolley and her amusement over the handprint her landlord, Mr. Appleby, leaves on the phone when he's fixing the house. Yet she uses broader strokes on weightier subjects, skimping on details: "Our personalities clicked," she writes plainly of one of her boyfriends, "but our relationship was spattered with rows." As the book unfolds, many of the chapters feel disjointed, as Smith reveals tiny, tantalizing glimpses of the characters' lives, but leaves them teasingly unexplored. When readers step back to see the whole, this memoir reveals not a picture of the characters, nor even the house itself, but the trivia of everyday life. (Sept. 9)
