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A Spot of Bother is an alternating-POV story about going quietly mad and loudly sane, and love under all our layers of repression and confusion: There’s newly-retired dad George, politely failing to bury his increasing obsessive thoughts of mortality under a zest for home renovations. Mom Jean, already balancing familial duty and work and volunteering, is just trying to find more time for her passionate affair with a long-time acquaintance. Their outspoken grown-up daughter Katie intends to marry her boyfriend Ray despite her suspicion that he’s wrong for her� because he’s right for her son. And emotionally-distant son Jamie just can’t explain to his boyfriend why he’s not invited to the wedding.

Haddon’s style is pretty sparse, but earnest. The characters� dramas could easily become trite, but their awareness and wryness in the face of their situations instead lends an endearing realness. At times I almost felt a little cheated that the split narratives, by necessity, truncated the fuller version of each story. But even with the glimpses, I got a sense that each Hall lived in a world beyond just the necessary set pieces, full of friends and coworkers and exes—of complex relationships—a specificity that allowed me to be drawn into their struggles in spite of myself. The strongest parts of the novel are actually when the family members directly interact. We get to “see� the same events in their overlapping voices, which surprised me by highlighting the complexities of intention and communication (rather than falling into tedious exercise).

If you’ve ever seen one of these comedies, it’s hardly a surprise that all these threads erupt into a madcap ending. I think some readers might find George’s central story kind of crass and shocking and inexplicable at times. I sort of wished Haddon was less enigmatic about it, especially being the subject that was probably the hardest to comprehend or relate to. But real life is not tied up so easily.

And so when all the dust settled, I found myself left with some heartwarming end scenes and some open end scenes� but most of all, the overall sense of empathy for the ways people try to make sense out of the chaos.

(Reread April 2012: Nothing to add of insight, except to note poor Mark Haddon, doomed to forever have his work as "not as good as his first novel Curious Incident. Well those people are wrong. A Spot of Bothers's comedy of manners is just as accessible, and it shows more maturity regarding character development and less reliance on the so-called cute gimmicks he's been accused of propogating. I'm sure I've saved him from crying into buckets of money now, so this reread has gone to good cause.)