Hourglass by Keiran Goddard review – a universal love story

The poet’s fiction debut vividly explores heartbreak, paranoia and the difficult work of being humanIf it’s true that in order to create something universal, you must pay very great attention to the specific, then with his fiction debut poet Keiran Goddard has written something like the universal love story. Written entirely in a kind of verse – by which I mean, a line break between almost every sentence – the three-part narrative goes like this: boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets over it. Sort of. Both characters are unnamed.The narrator, a sometime essayist working a series of dead-end jobs, meets an editor. She has written four slim publications about Restoration drama (“smart people call short books slim books”). They fall in love; and she, at least, falls out of it. The plot is everyone’s plot, at some time or another – and that in itself is the heartbreaking thing about heartbreak. No pain is unique, and all pain is unique. This is the paradox that powers Hourglass. I have rarely read a book that captures so succinctly the way that all lovers must (at least a little bit) believe they are the only people to ever feel this feeling, and the way that that is (at least a little bit) true. Continue reading...