Daily Telegraph
If chick-lit authors were supermarkets, there would be an awful lot of Asdas - I can even think of a couple of Lidls. But Marian Keyes is Fortnum's. She is Dean & Deluca. She is Fauchon. The rest of us can only gaze on with a mixture of adoration and envy: we are potted meats, she is caviar. And, treat of treats, The Other Side of the Story is her best book to date.
It's about three women. Lily Wright briefly becomes a successful author, having written a winsome Chocolat-like word-of-mouth success called "Mimi's Remedies", in which a wise stranger-woman comes to a village and makes everyone happy. Though Keyes's humour usually errs on the side of kindness, she is here slyly and knowingly funny about books, authors, literary agents, newspaper interviewers. The latter, as one of her characters notes - just before a photographer forces her to swing, monkey-like, from a tree while going "HA HA HA HA HA'- come in two formats: shoulder-padded and over-made-up, or curiously tramp-like.
Then there's Lily's American literary representative Jojo Harvey, a superagent of the ballbusting variety; and Lily's former friend Gemma Hogan. Gemma hates Lily for stealing her boyfriend, Anton. Lily is still - years and a baby later - consumed by guilt at having done so, and considers herself undeserving of happiness. So far, so formulaic: three women, sexy jobs, boy trouble, blah-di-blah. But there are no fluffy half-formed twentysomethings here, because Keyes's particular skill is to absolutely inhabit these characters, and to give them properly realised lives: in among the frocks and the boys and the sparkling jokes, she deftly addresses depression, anger, pain, guilt, ambition and the question of revenge, and does so with such unusual generosity and warm-heartedness that the minutiae of the lives of these three women become quite engrossing.
The insanely competitive Jojo sleeps with her boss and uses American police slang when under pressure, which really ought to make one dislike her - but it becomes quite hard to. Lily, who ought to be unbearably wet, isn't, thanks to the skill of her creator, and her story is properly moving. Gemma, who gibbers with jealousy when Lily's book is reviewed favourably in the Irish Times, has a recently abandoned, morbidly depressed mother with a martyr complex, and has to put her glamorous life on hold in order to move back home to look after her - these scenes are richly funny. Keyes, as befits someone who once set a jolly romp in a rehab centre, is excellent at rooting the comedy from apparently grim situations.
Gemma cheers herself up by e-mailing Mills & Boon-esque fantasies to a friend. Here she is imagining having escaped to some bleak, wild seascape and repelling the advances of the local farmer (cum film director, natch):
I'd have an ethereal fragile quality about me, but because I was so wounded I'd be rude to him in the village shop... He'd take to leaving two fresh eggs on my doorstep in the morning. I'd get back from my four-mile stomp along the cliffs to find the eggs, still warm from the hens of course, waiting for my breakfast... I'd make a delicious omelette with some wild parsley snipped from the garden... At some stage I'd end up in his kitchen where I'd see him feeding a tiny lamb from a baby's battle and my heart would begin its long overdue thaw.
This is basically the plot of dozens of po-faced middlebrow books for would-be, femrnes serieuses; and that Keyes should be able to parody it so precisely and dismissively while writing something entirely superior is an excellent joke in itself. I whooped my way through this book: it is far more tightly plotted and better paced than its predecessors, it has texture and form in spades, it had me in tears more than once and, very often, it had me barking with laughter.