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The Fit
by Philip Hensher


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John Carrington's wife leaves him and he gets a neverending case of hiccups.

Fourth Estate, 336 pages
07/05/2004

ISBN: 0007174810

Fiction
General Literature & Fiction

NOTES:
Not yet released in the United States.

All reviews are classified as one of five grades: Outstanding (4 points), Favorable (3), Mixed (2), Unfavorable (1) and Terrible (0). To calculate the Metascore, we divide total points achieved by the total points possible (i.e., 4 x the number of reviews), with the resulting percentage (multiplied by 100) being the Metascore. Learn more...

Daily Telegraph Niall Ferguson

This novel is disconcertingly original - a wonderfully odd comedy cleverly structured around absences.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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The Fit by Philip Hensher

The Fit
by Philip Hensher