![]() Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. Thus the novel chronicles the way huge life events are parsed out into days their impact on a consciousness that remains quotidian, tied to routine, preoccupied with anxiety and pencil sharpening and work, even as it is swelled and rocked by life and death. Toby (the protagonist, rather than the author of the book) is given a diary by his partner for Christmas, and writes in it daily. These simple, tectonic movements play out with a kind of tidal inevitability, but the surface of the book is preoccupied with something entirely different. At the level of narrative, the book documents a couple’s journey towards parenthood, a vulnerable process after three previous miscarriages, contrasted with the narrator’s slow loss of his mother to cancer. However, his novel is not about these bedrock life events, not really, and the restraint with which he articulates them leaves space for a different exploration. ![]() Litt comes across as a writer who shies away from demonstrativeness his approach to letting deep feeling land is defined by a Chekhovian taciturnity that doesn’t always emotionally engage the reader. Animated by the steady approach of two classic intersecting narrative themes, birth and death, the novel’s architecture is relatively conventional, as its protagonist, a writer named Toby Litt, navigates the emotional impact of these two life events. Across nearly 400 pages, A Writer’s Diary charts the life of a man over the course of a year. T oby Litt’s latest novel, originally published online via Substack, is a hugely readable achievement.
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