Nicholas Lezard has the real ex factor

Bitter Experience Has Taught Me: Adventures in Love, Loss and Penury
by Nicholas Lezard (Faber, £9.99)

Nicholas Lezard was married to the same woman for almost two decades. This is, as he remarks in his invigoratingly bleak account of post-marital life, “quite the long haul in this day and age”. To call time on a marriage that has produced three children and endured until just two months shy of its 20th anniversary seems an exhausting business: Macbeth’s line about being “in blood stepp’d in so far, that... /Returning were as tedious as go o’er...” comes to mind.

It was not Lezard who decided he’d had enough, however, but Mrs L, and he is fairly cagey as to her reasons for giving him his congé — though a clue is to be found in his reply to her accusation that “you never do anything you don’t want to do”.

“Well,” writes Lezard, “all I could think of in response to that, after a little shrug suggesting that there were, in fact, many things that I did which I would have preferred not to, was, ‘One tries one’s best’.” You begin to see why she might have got fed up.

The story begins one melancholy September day, when Lezard finds himself ejected from the family home to live in an establishment known as “the Hovel” — an unpicturesquely dilapidated Victorian maisonette near Baker Street, sketchily furnished with other people’s discarded possessions and last redecorated some time in the early Seventies.

The culture, Lezard remarks, is full of stories of newly single men “convincing themselves they have found a new life, a reversion to groovy bachelorhood in their middle years”. But one of his many engaging qualities is an unwillingness to look on the bright side. His new home is, he writes, “the saddest place I have ever seen”.

It has two redeeming features: an adjacent Majestic wine store and a fellow inmate — his friend, Razors. He also finds himself in a bit of a marital pickle but his admirable capacity for alcohol and ability to complete the Guardian crossword bring a touch of douceur de vivre to an existence that otherwise resembles an indoor version of Waiting for Godot.

With the support of Majestic, Razors, and some imposingly heavy-duty reading matter (he is justifiably proud of his ability to support himself, and his estranged family, by “reading books and then writing about them”), plus the cheering appearance of a plausible candidate for the position of the Next Mrs Lezard, we arrive at the point when he admits, cautiously, that “things don’t seem so bad, after all”. Which is pretty much all that any of us can hope for, really.

Lezard’s book is based on a series of columns he wrote for the New Statesman, and some small signs of its origins are visible in occasional slight repetitions and chronological oddities. Not that these detract from the pleasure. He is a master of the comic vignette even (or especially) when consumed with self-pity.

From a gruesome visit to a lap-dancing club to a drunken night cricket match in a Marylebone mews, or an encounter with Boris Johnson’s sister, Rachel (“I jumped; I think I may even have screamed a little bit”), his elegant excursion into the post-marital emotional wasteland is sweetened with an almost Wodehousian sense of the preposterous.