There’s an Oliphant in the room — but this time it’s a middle-aged man

Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine was such a hit. The debut novel of university administrator Gail Honeyman, it attracted a bidding war at the 2015 Frankfurt Book Festival. Published in hardback in 2017, it sold nearly 300,000 copies — and then became by far the best-selling paperback of 2018, with no fewer than 1,012,788 UK sales achieved now. It’s soon to be filmed by Reese Witherspoon. 

Fair enough. It is a rewarding and touching story about loneliness and social isolation and how they can be overcome by human kindness, however severe the trauma behind them. There had never been anything quite like it before either. 

Now, more or less inevitably, here’s Eleanor Oliphant for men. Richard Roper works in publishing, as non-fiction editor at Headline. When his agent offered Something to Live For to publishers in June last year, it attracted “some of the highest and fastest international  pre-empts” they’d ever seen. Understandably, for it ticks the Eleanor Oliphant boxes with fantastic assiduity, with a little David Nicholls and Nick Hornby triangulation thrown in for buyer reassurance. Moreover, it’s perfectly well done and often quite funny too. 

Andrew works for the local council, arranging the funerals of people who have died without known next of kin. Middle-aged, he lives quietly on his own in an unloved flat off the Old Kent Road, passing his evenings with his model railway, chatting online to other enthusiasts on the ModelTrainNuts forum.

Unfortunately, when he was interviewed for the job five years ago, he was embarrassed into pretending he was married with two kids, a pretence he now has to maintain every day. That’s difficult for Andrew, who is almost as socially isolated as the people whose sad funerals he arranges, painfully estranged even from his sister, whom he blames for fleeing the family home after their father’s death and their mother’s collapse.

Then a new recruit arrives in the office. Peggy from Tyneside, 38, is witty, sympathetic and unhappily married. Soon she and Andrew are working well together, even going to the pub. But how can Andrew ever admit that his own supposedly happy home life is total fabrication? Only through the revelation of a shocking and violent trauma in his past, exactly as in Eleanor Oliphant.

Something to Live For competently offers another serving of the same pleasure as its template. As reader, you are throughout in possession of the emotional responsiveness that the protagonists have suppressed in themselves, so you can feel for them as much as you like from a position of some comfort. Soothing!  

Something to Live For by Richard Roper (Orion, £12.99)