{"id":5246,"date":"2014-07-07T11:41:24","date_gmt":"2014-07-07T11:41:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=5246"},"modified":"2014-07-12T16:47:57","modified_gmt":"2014-07-12T16:47:57","slug":"upstairs-at-the-party-by-linda-grant","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=5246","title":{"rendered":"Upstairs at the Party by Linda Grant"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Published by Virago 3 July 2014<\/strong><\/p>\n

320pp hardback \u00a314.99<\/strong><\/p>\n

Reviewed by Alison Burns<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u2018This is how I came to be at university, I came at it as if I\u2019d shot myself from a cannon across a river at a fortified target.\u00a0 I passed through the glittering gate to knowledge, to the concrete campus and its plastic-bottomed lake, its ducks and drakes and population of girls and boys with immaculate examination records and me the imposter, trying to learn how to speak and dress and not be dragged back to the cut-glass bottles and the Rosenblatt trap.\u2019<\/em><\/p>\n

Liverpool in the early seventies: teenage Adele Ginsberg is desperate to escape from her provincial \u00e9migr\u00e9 background and her Saturday job at the perfume counter.\u00a0 She wins a poetry competition and blags her way into a new university on the other side of the country on the strength of three undistinguished A levels and an encouraging postcard from American poet Allen Ginsberg (no relation)<\/p>\n

This is the age of free education.\u00a0 Her university has no rules, but it also has no pastoral care. Students are the future:\u00a0 they must be allowed to question everything, try everything, and then sink or swim.\u00a0 For a while, chain-smoking, hard-faced Adele enjoys the carnival.\u00a0 Looking back, she knows that they were children living in a kind of Shangri-La.\u00a0 Her new friends include outrageous Bobby, a gay (though closeted) Iranian, three earnest young women, Gillian, Rose and Dora, and an inseparable couple, Evie\/Stevie, on whose doomed relationship the narrative turns.<\/p>\n

Like some others in her year, Adele is in flight from more than suburbia and family expectations.\u00a0 With the advent of a consciousness-raising group, secrets emerge to match her own, which happens to be that her beloved, extravagant father turned out to be a crook and hanged himself.\u00a0 Evie, in particular (lovely mesmerizing Evie), is struggling with more than her evident eating disorder.\u00a0 Rape, pregnancy, depression, mania and deceit all figure in this melting pot, as does the legacy of Nazism.<\/p>\n

Neatly avoiding the challenge of loving a woman, Adele falls for Evie\u2019s brother George, a passionate man living on a barge on the Thames.\u00a0 They conduct a secret affair.\u00a0 When disaster strikes, an accidental death, every one of them feels guilty and the network of friends splits apart. Years later, across a gulf of time that has taken her from hippie Cornwall to a squat in Stoke Newington to life as a successful features editor, Adele pieces together the story of what happened.<\/p>\n

As in her previous novels, Linda Grant evokes a time and place with acutely accurate social and behavioural detail.\u00a0 Clothes, conversations, fads, fronts, ideas\u00a0 –\u00a0 they are all here.\u00a0 What she also achieves is a believable portrait of young people muddling through and only every knowing half of each other\u2019s stories.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reviewed by Alison Burns<\/p>\n

This is the age of free education. Her university has no rules, but it also has no pastoral care. Students are the future: they must be allowed to question everything, try everything, and then sink or swim. For a while, chain-smoking, hard-faced Adele enjoys the carnival. Looking back, she knows that they were children living in a kind of Shangri-La […] in Reviews<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5246","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-new-fiction-and-non-fiction","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5246","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5246"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5246\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5266,"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5246\/revisions\/5266"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5246"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5246"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5246"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}