Readers of Mark Bowles’s All My Precious Madness (2024) will find much that is familiar in How Do People Stay the Same. Both are about a Bradford-born writer with a love of travel, philosophy and espresso. Both eschew conventional narrative for their protagonist’s meandering reflections on his past and spleen-ventings about the modern world. And both are characterised by long, clause-rich sentences that never lose their way.
The differences are of tone and form. All My Precious Madness was, to be reductive, a funny novel with sad moments, a formless rant that did suffer by its formlessness. How Do People Stay the Same is a sad novel with funny moments, a fascinating formal experiment that tells its story via a series of reverse- ordered journal entries. So, at the start, in November 2023, Patrick Boyd is the doting father of a delightful young son – a man who has achieved his happy ending; and as the novel progresses back through more than 30 years, we see that happiness unpicked by depression, eating disorders, failed relationships and housing troubles.
The title comes from Patrick’s belief that people do not stay the same. In his view we are but a ‘disjointed succession of selves, giving illusory continuity by the easy but vacant pronoun “I”’, a theory that the novel’s inverted chronology and spottiness of coverage (Patrick throws one of his journals into the Seine) gives greater credence to than would a more traditionally told story. Yet for all that Patrick changes – ‘As if I would ever have a child,’ he scoffs in 1997 – there are small continuities of self: his repeated use of the word ‘lucent’; and two almost identically phrased meditations on monstrousness penned seven years apart. I appreciate Bowles not making his point too neatly.
In any case, the idea is bold enough. Story-telling manuals inform us that a character must change by smooth, gentle increments, but Patrick’s regression is far from smooth. At one moment he is dancing joyously around his awful 12th-floor flat, the next reflecting gloomily on a long-dead friendship. If the results make for an uneven read, this speaks principally to what limited notions we have about story and character development. In its very disjointedness, Bowles’s bracing book gets closer to the messy truth of life than do most novels.
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