All the festivity is over and the more serious business of the new year is upon us. Yep, it’s a bit of a bore.
You may want to resist the idea that a new calendar on the fridge entails a fresh start, a different life, a better you. Put like that, it does sound exhausting. But I’m afraid literature supports it. As TS Eliot said: the end is where we start from. And a full stop on the last year means that a new sentence, paragraph or whole new story can suddenly open up.
In Sue Gee’s The Mysteries Of Glass, Richard Allen is invited to a skating party to celebrate the first day of 1861. He’s the new curate in a remote country parish — don’t you love a fictional curate? — and keen to make the best impression.
For some, this can be an emotionally challenging time, as it is for Archie Jones in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (left) and Katya from Brooklyn, in Amor Towles’s wonderfully glamorous Rules Of Civility (right), wants to change her life, and as 1938 dawns, change it she does
But there in the glittering sun, both the passions and secrets that will dominate his year are revealed to him: his heart stands still at the ‘quicksilver sight of another man’s wife’; the face of a dead woman looms up from under the ice. And the course of his future is forever changed.
Katya from Brooklyn, in Amor Towles’s wonderfully glamorous Rules Of Civility, wants to change her life, and as 1938 dawns, change it she does.
Calling herself Katey, she gets in to a swanky party full of chilled champagne and handsome, entitled young men, including the irresistible Theodore Grey. Soon she’s kissing goodbye to the typing pool and boarding house, and saying hello to the glossy mag and the Central Park apartment with doorman. Her fairytale has begun.
For some, this can be an emotionally challenging time, as it is for Archie Jones in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. At 6.27am on January 1, 1975, he’s slumped in a fume-filled car on Cricklewood Broadway, his indicator ‘flashing a right turn he had resolved never to make’, when a chance encounter saves him. Within minutes, he’s in the dregs of a previous night’s party and meeting his future wife.
That’s the new year for you. You can try to resist it, but still that fresh start might just come and find you.