Ordinary is a relative term. The Derbyshire village where I spend the weekends may look normal on the outside - a grey-roofed huddle of houses, the odd cat, a couple of pubs - yet dig a little deeper and it all gets pretty strange. Particularly if you dig as deep as the electricity board did recently at the bottom of our lane, and discover a heap of human bones (the headmistress at the nearby primary school became used to having children waving Saxon femurs at her and saying, "What's this, Miss?"). The local paper, meanwhile, divides its pages between an endless series of reports about UFO sightings (one of which ended up in the Daily Mail) and pets being rescued from house fires of the most unlikely nature - "Tortoise snatched from tanning machine inferno" being the latest.
So when I read that the central premise of Misadventures is its "ordinariness", I was suspicious. I was right. There is nothing remotely "ordinary" about Sylvia Smith. OK, so she's had a series of humdrum jobs, been on the dole and lived in boarding houses, but she has also clocked up the far from normal statistic of going out with more than 100 men before her 25th birthday. What's more, she has written a "novel" about it all. One written with what, for someone with the bare minimum of formal education, is suspicious skill. Suspicious, too, that Smith's many Misadventures, which cover a span of almost half a century, fail to include references to reading or books of any sort - specifically, The Diary of a Nobody, whose style it so closely resembles. But whether Sylvia Smith is real and has a rarely talented editor or whether she is the elaborate fictional creation of another author, I have no idea. (I suspect the truth is somewhere in the middle.)
The overwhelming Pooterishness of its tone ("Bob invited me to dinner one Thursday evening and we made arrangements that he would meet me by car at his local Underground station") suggests that this book is ultimately a comic work, despite the occasional lapses into pathos - sudden deaths, the ending of relationships and so on. The more banal the anecdote, the more surreal the effect; Misadventures gets most of its laughs through an inspired use of non sequiturs ("I arrived at the Underground station at the appointed hour but there was no Bob. After waiting 40 minutes I went home, taking my sausages with me"). The final "misadventure", simply titled "The Man", describes someone who has shat himself while wearing white shorts.
Given our current climate of humour, with its all-pervading irony and the lionisation of anything retrospective, it seems impossible that Misadventures was not published with a nod to this market. Set, as much of it is, in the Bri-Nyloned Seventies suburbs, it has a strong whiff of retro-sitcom land - in which groups of adults share boarding houses and have ill-fated nights out with people they have met through social clubs. This Rising Damp/Love Thy Neighbour atmosphere is intensified by the racist attitudes of some of Smith's acquaintances, although Smith herself has a string of inter-racial affairs.
Form vies strongly with content throughout the book: each of the misadventures - a short anecdote, usually two or three pages long - has its own date and title, beautifully set out, and - shades again of Diary of a Nobody - an introduction before the "misadventure" itself begins. ("Bob was 30, I was 24. We met at a dance at the Empire ballroom in Leicester Square. We had one date.")
The one connecting thread, apart from chronology, in the seemingly random collection of anecdotes is the character of Smith herself; if Misadventures has a theme at all, it is of a somewhat luckless and rather lonely career as a temporary secretary, and an even more luckless and lonely personal life peopled by lovers met at pedestrian crossings and friends met through social clubs. Sometimes sad, often funny, sometimes merely staggering in its banality - moreover, unquestionably well-written - the one thing this book never feels is "ordinary".
Wendy Holden's latest novel is Pastures Nouveaux (Hodder Headline, £10)
