Profoundly Ordinary: Jon McGregor and Everyday Life

The fiction of Jon McGregor is distinguished by its attentiveness to the mundane and the profane, the overlooked and the discarded. Provincial and urban in outlook and setting but absorbed in the apparently trivial details of their characters’ lives, his novels and stories discover the extraordinary in ordinary routines or relationships while remaining alert to the alienations that inhere in the very textures of everyday life. Far-reaching changes in the social and economic life of industrial cities in the Midlands and North of England during the postwar period provide a consistent context for his narratives of displacement and impermanence. If this summary implies a primarily documentary aesthetic, then it is also worth noting the extent of McGregor’s formal and stylistic inventiveness, which attests to the continuing influence of modernist aesthetic sensibilities for twenty-first-century fiction.¹ Both Virginia Woolf and James Joyce are important touchstones for his narrative techniques, and while McGregor’s fiction can superficially resemble what Zadie Smith calls “lyrical realism,” he eschews that tradition’s “consoling myth” of the authentic self as a “bottomless pool” (75). Less concerned with individual than collective or intersubjective constructions of contemporary reality, McGregor’s novels repeatedly confront the steady erosion of meaningful social relations in postwar Britain by imagining alternative forms of community in circumstances of anonymity, abandonment, and neglect. His most abiding preoccupation is with the “common” in its dual sense, recorded by Raymond Williams, as what is ordinary and what is shared (Keywords 71). This essay will examine the depiction of everyday life in McGregor’s three novels to date, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things (2002), So Many Ways to Begin (2006), and Even the Dogs (2010). It will argue that these texts each encounter certain intractable ethical and representational dilemmas in their efforts to depict the everyday in its very everydayness. Nonetheless, through their imaginative alignments with common people, places, and things, McGregor’s fictions can also be seen to elaborate a representational aesthetic that is fundamentally democratic in its assumptions and implications.

Two key features of everyday life are its ubiquity and its insignificance. The latter seems to follow logically from the former: precisely because the events of everyday life happen every day, they become routine, familiar, part of the background rather than the foreground of our experiences. On the other hand, the everyday is also the matrix from which significant experiences arise, a necessary basis for all that is not merely banal. According to Henri Lefebvre, “Everyday life is profoundly related to all activities, and encompasses them with all their differences and their conflicts; it is their meeting place, their bond, their common ground” (Critique I 97). This is one of the essential ambiguities of everyday life: although peripheral and unimportant, it is also fundamental or foundational. The significance of the everyday is found in its very insignificance, and the ordinary is a precondition of the extraordinary. Moreover, Michael Sheringham notes the curiously fugitive character of what is closest to hand. “We are immersed in the everyday,” he writes, “yet at the same time cut off from it; nothing we do can be totally reduced to it, nor wholly be detached from it” (146). This duality raises problems of both theoretical definition and literary representation, for it is difficult, if not impossible, to say where everyday life begins and ends. Its parameters must be described from within; yet when approached, it seems to hide itself or recede from view. Such paradoxical characteristics lead Maurice Blanchot to remark that, by definition, the everyday “escapes” definition: “It belongs to insignificance, and the insignificant is without truth, without reality, without secret, but perhaps also the site of all possible signification” (239–40). Once again, everyday life reveals its capacity to deconstruct polarized oppositions, comprehending significance and insignificance, the ordinary and the extraordinary at once.

If this brief overview implies a certain consistency to the concept of everyday life as developed in twentieth-century critical theory, however, it is also necessary to note some sharp differences and disagreements. For instance, where Lefebvre’s dialectical approach regards everyday life as an...