Yes, there is an English obliqueness to the way in which the characters reveal themselves to the reader and to each other. Certainly his characters here embody a particular modern London sensibility, and were one to turn out this novel's pockets it would probably be carrying an Oyster card. It has been said that Szalay is a very English novelist. Eschewing simplicity and closure on every page right through to this novel's heartbreakingly entropic end, he does readers the courtesy of presenting grown-up characters freighted with layered histories from which they cannot cleanly break, then trusts us to have the emotional bigness necessary to like them. Szalay refuses to afford such certainty either to his protagonists or to the reader. People want certainty in relationships – to know where one stands in the affections of another. When he phones her, standing in the silence of the flat, it is only because he wants to know that things are okay. No reader who has lived even slightly will fail to relate to James, who is "worried that things are not okay. Szalay has an unnerving ability to project us into those desperately ambiguous situations typical of the beginnings and endings of most of our relationships, and yet sustained throughout the whole of this one. This is a novel about the possibility of love and the certainty of a very grown-up kind of heavy, unshakeable despair that is all the more poignant for being, rather often, indistinguishable from a sly and quiet humour. Like Laughable Loves-era Milan Kundera, Szalay at his best positions his characters somewhere along the endlessly contested lines that he draws between comedy and something subtler, less showy, and altogether sadder than tragedy. Instead he simply etherises his subjects with a kind of sexy, knowing ennui and then takes a scalpel to their still-living tissues. His art doesn't require a plot or a storyline, though adequate versions of both are to be found here for those who like that sort of thing.
Szalay excels in the patient dissection of emotional self-concepts. To describe the plot as a love triangle would be to seriously misconstrue Szalay's relativist approach to human geometry, in which points certainly exist but the lines joining them – or not – are subject to an intricate and continuous redrafting from the perspectives of the points themselves.
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