John Carrington's wife leaves him and he gets a neverending case of hiccups.
Critic Reviews
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Favorable
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Daily Telegraph Niall Ferguson
This novel is disconcertingly original - a wonderfully odd comedy cleverly structured around absences.
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Favorable
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The Independent Patrick Gale
The Fit opens with John waking to find [his wife] has left him and that he has hiccups. What follows in Philip Hensher's novel is that staple of English comedy: the gleeful dismantling of an orderly life.
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Mixed
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The Spectator Sebastian Smee
The dialogue throughout is terrific, full of snappy non-sequiturs and sense-shifting lapses in logic. Overall, however, I felt that the book might have benefited from a longer -- or at least a more careful -- gestation. On the other hand, Hensher is such a marvellous writer that one wants to read almost anything he writes.
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Mixed
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Daily Telegraph Robert Douglas-Fairhurst
The closer you get to this stylish novel, the better it looks: a comedy of manners that is crammed with cleverness, warmth and genuinely funny jokes. That left-handed compliment entails a right-handed complaint: the further away you move, the more its cracks show.
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Mixed
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The Guardian Adam Mars-Jones
Comedy is an ambush. It can't work if we can see the forces lying in wait. Writing that signals its intentions with exaggerated phrasing... ends up being only jocular.
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Mixed
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The Guardian Ian Sansom
So, The Fit doesn't, quite: it seems partly intended as a serious, sensitive book about incomplete creatures seeking to make themselves whole, but it is remarkable really as a knockabout venting of spleen and fury.
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