Ever since Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary so brilliantly carved out a new genre of thirty-something-singletons-with-angst novels, the publishing world has been trying furiously to work out what the Next Big Thing will be. Now, with her first novel, My Life on a Plate, journalist India Knight has taken a fairly logical step, and come up with what might just be the answer; a tale of thirtysomething married angst.
Clara Hutt (who privately refers to herself as Jabba the Hutt) is married to the lovely Robert, the kind of man who knows whether a dress is bias cut or not. They have two small but boisterous boys and a small but charming house in London. Clara also has a part-time career as a magazine writer, although that looks rather touch and go after she is sent to interview a male Irish dancer, and ends up getting drunk and unwittingly giving him head lice.
She knows she should be content with her life - she's not serially single like her friend Amber and nor is her husband having an affair like Naomi's - but there's something about the sheer lack of excitement in Clara's marriage that she's beginning to find very, very worrying.
Readers of The Observer will probably find this plotline curiously familiar; much of My Life on a Plate is based on Knight's own marriage breakdown, which she wrote about in her weekly column, "Navel Gazing". While that column detailed the fallout after Knight's marriage broke up, the novel paints, with small brushstrokes, a portrait of a marriage which is settling quietly into disrepair.
Ironically, basing her first novel so closely on her own life seems to have provided My Life on a Plate with both its strong points and its weak. Knight is great on the picaresque details of the life of a wife and mother who still believes in the lyrics of Madonna songs, and her account of the slow, unremarkable process of disenchantment is a more accurate description of marital breakdown than a high-octane tale of broken plates and intrigue might be. Yet two-thirds of the way through a novel in which nothing very much really happens, I found myself hoping that the exciting sound of breaking china and incipient paranoia was not far off.