A succession of selves: How Do People Stay the Same by Mark Bowles reviewed
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.
