Title: Mutton
Author: India Knight
Published: 2012, Penguin
Years ago I read India Knight’s My Life on a Plate and loved it. It read like a grown-up Bridget Jones’s Diary, and I wanted more. Mutton is that more.
Unfortunately, it did not hit the spot. Clara is divorced, her children are grown up. And all she seems to be able to think about is her looks.
This is one of my pet peeves. I am constantly surprised by women agonising over wrinkles and fat and whatnot in their 40s. Admittedly, the body does change. But by their 40s haven’t most women come to terms with how they look? If anything, the thing that becomes a worry in one’s 40s is wear and tear and general health. But surely most of us are done with insecurities about how we look by now?
It seems as if writers are determined to stick with the formula regardless of the age of their protagonist.
There’s also this rather passe pitting of the Manic Pixie Dreamgirl 2.0 protagonist with lacquered over (a Bridget Jones Diary term) women. This was something I noticed in Knight’s Don’t You Want Me, and I find this kind of catfight stereotyping tedious.
Here Clara distinguishes between Team Chocolate – “the women in perfect blow-dries who organize passive-aggressive, competitive, show-off coffee mornings that would put the Stepford Wives to shame” – and Team Cheese, women who are presumably less fake.
Clara says “hanging out with women is my raison d’etre, practically” – a statement after my own heart – but it’s certain kinds of women, women like her friend Gaby (even though Gaby’s entire appearance is entirely a facade predicated on making her look younger) and another friend Annie, with “her normal impulses, her fearless embrace of the carbs, her appetite”. And Gaby and Annie do not get on because Annie is a reminder to women like Gaby that there is more than one way of “being contented and of getting blokes to look at you”.
Clara has a rather conservative list of what she likes in a man, ranging from being able to “navigate a wine list” and “speak at least one foreign language passably” to “carry your cases and bags without asking” and “use a drill without making anxious squeaks about self-electrocution”. She has not interest in the kind of things women (presumably those on Team Chocolate) seem to want women to be able to do: “have sympathy period cramp, express their emotions freely through the medium of interpretative dance, start sentences with ‘As a feminist’.” (Even as I scoff at this phrasing and what it implies, I have to acknowledge that deep down I’m the same).
Another repeat from Don’t You Want Me is the women on the town, one wanting to go to the disco, the other to sleepy to be bothered – something that many of us can relate to, but still tedious when it becomes a trope. On one of these dates, Clara meets a man and yet she’s pining for another, an Australian that we never really meet.
And then there’s the mother figure – in this case a woman who has very definite views on how women should look, which includes not messing around with Botox.
There are some moments that resonated with me.
On dating:
Everyone is so lonely, really, it’s piteous.
On parenting:
Why do teenagers behave like you’ve violated their human rights when you ask them to help around the house?
On shopping in your 40s:
The problem is that these garments – the magical ones that suddenly make you think, ‘Cor, I’d totally do me,’ to yourself and make you feel sorry for all your other clothes – grow increasingly elusive. I mean, they absolutely exist – it’s just that tracking them down can take an eternity, at my age.
But beyond that, I found myself mildly irritated throughout.
Do you feel the chick lit formula has run its course, or is it just me getting older?
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