RUNNING BUT NOT LOSING

About five years later than everyone else, I have just read Ron McLarty's excellent debut novel, "The Memory of Running" about the disfunctional family life but final salvation (via cycling and the love of a crippled neighbour), of one Smithson ('Smithy') Ide: fat, drunken Vietnam vet.

As always, the dust wrapper of this book, carries extensively edited and apparently supportive comments from reviewers including one quote from the Philadelphia Enquirer that gives Mr Ide an honourable inclusion in the list of fictional American losers. (Other names weren't listed by I am sure Updike's Rabbit Angstrom and two or three of John Irving's interchangeable characters would be among that crowd.)

Like others of his fictional ilk, Ide is a lower middle class white-collar worker, in his case with a dead-end job as a quality control superviser in a toy production factory. But his position within society has set me to wondering whether contemporary British literature includes any similar figures.

Of course we have working class heroes and anti-heroes, and earlier writing, for example by Dickens or George and Weedon Grossmith, contains a number semi-respectable individuals who are above labourers in their employment but hardly in any other way.

Some have told me that Ide's equivalent position in today's British literature is almost exclusively occupied by women.

Sad if true.