The Small Matter of Getting There

Julie Rak is a Ph.D. candidate in English at McMaster University.

This short novel set in London, England, follows the rising fortunes of
Mal Sully, a streetwise young fiction writer whose first novel is
accepted for publication, plunging him into an unfamiliar world of
celebrity and glitterati, and into the arms of his ambitious,
sophisticated, and much-older publisher, Kay Blessing. Short vignettes,
interspersed with passages from Mal’s rather hardboiled novel, I
Guarantee It Ain’t Your Day, and Mal’s diary, The Small Matter of
Getting There, trace the development of his affair with Kay, his
subsequent dissatisfaction with his own rather gritty life, and the
affair’s sudden end when Mal can’t produce a second brilliant
working-class novel. The simple storyline with its broadly sketched
characters—Mal is a sort of James Dean in the midst of a class
transition—is saved from becoming a dreary morality tale by such
cynical lines as “She was pretty when she smiled, although the laugh
lines could have been wrapped around her head” and “His jeans lay
tangled on the floor, butt up.”

Slater’s cool, urban style parodies that of classic detective fiction
without descending into mockery. But her fine eye for detail and clever
phrases mean that some of the story’s weightier themes—Kay’s
ambition, the class differences between Kay and Mal, and the texture of
literary elite life in London—are sketched, but not filled in.
Slater’s love of the punchy vignette ultimately sells the story short;
the novel ends so suddenly that it seems Slater just decided to stop
without even allowing it to trail off into ambiguity. But these problems
are minor. The Small Matter of Getting There is an engaging portrait, in
miniature, of success and its discontents.