Clarissa's Blog

Jem Calder wrote A Restaurant Somewhere Else before his excellent novel I Want You To Be Happy. It is either a short novel or a very long short story, and its quality is not as high as that of I Want You To Be Happy. Calder is growing as a writer, and it’s a good sign that the later book is significantly better than the earlier one.

It makes a lot of sense to read both novels together, because they work as companion pieces to each other. I Want You To Be Happy tells the story of a man who sabotages his romantic, professional, and social life out of hubris and a fear of being tied down. A Restaurant Somewhere Else tells a similar story about a woman. In both books, the main characters could have excellent careers, make money, have friends, and start families, but they throw all of that away in order to sit alone in a crappy rented room, angry at the world, feeling betrayed, and wondering where to find money to cover the next rent payment.

I am very interested in this phenomenon because Jem Calder is not the only writer who describes this exact scenario. There are many such novels in different languages. I am going to talk about this in an article I am planning to start in October. There is a whole subgenre of novels about people who are tragically unhappy, self-destructive, often suicidal, but their unhappiness is not caused by any external force or circumstances. Instead, it is eagerly and aggressively pursued by the characters themselves. “I had a great job, was making good money, had a relationship, people wanted to be friends with me, but then I went ahead and demolished all of it because I want to be free to pursue endless change” is the life philosophy of these characters.

Unsurprisingly, the last word of A Restaurant Somewhere Else is “changed”.