Subscriber OnlyBooksReview

Someday, Maybe: Limits of mutual insight exposed in tale around suicide

Onyi Nwabineli uses pregnancy as a convenient plot device but the writing is buoyant and characters palpable

Onyi Nwabineli avoids grief porn in a tale of a happy couple ruptured by suicide. Photograph: Precious Agbabiaka

Sat Nov 19 2022 - 05:18
Someday, Maybe
Someday, Maybe
Author: Onyi Nwabineli
ISBN-13: 978-0861543519
Publisher: Magpie
Guideline Price: £16.99

“How well do you ever know a person?” is a time-worn question that might haunt any relationship, but it tortures Eve, the narrator of Someday, Maybe, as she reckons with her husband’s suicide. “I knew everything about him,” Eve insists, and Quentin was, “as far as I and everyone else could tell, perfectly happy.”

Eve begins her story self-anaesthetised by rum, “benzos and barbiturates” so the narrative moves as she traverses memories. Eve and the “underwear-model fine” Q, aka Quentin Christian Malcolm Morrow, the only heir of Britain’s third-wealthiest family, met at university. They flouted the Christian apprehensions of Eve’s British-Nigerian family, and the overt racism of Aspen, Q’s hateful mother; they married when Eve was just 21.

Eve recalls a love too big to waste time, a decade of wedded bliss, gleeful skipping across sandy beaches, stratospheric orgasms. He became a celebrated photographer; she pioneered online lifestyle curation at the London magazine Circle (essentially a fictionalized VICE). When Eve landed this job, Q sent a hundred white roses to the office. “He was about big splashy gestures,” Eve tells the reader. His most profound gesture, however, was one of inaction. When Q died by suicide, he didn’t leave Eve – or anyone – a note.

Quentin’s self-portrait

When Eve discovers she’s 11 weeks pregnant, she flees reality to the Isle of Man. Here, Q’s work is in an exhibition. “The pain is right there,” says a student looking at Quentin’s self-portrait, one Eve hadn’t noticed. Hearing this is the first time Eve allows herself to feel anger: Q withheld from her something that was vital to his art, his expression of self. “He had his reasons,” Eve later says, “and they were his to have, and my entitlement to them is something I must, in time, relinquish.”

READ MORE

In Someday, Maybe, the writing is buoyant, the characters are palpable, the content eschews grief porn. A pregnancy, however, is a known plot device and, in this novel, it feels like one. It accelerates Eve’s ability to evolve without closure, and its visibility calls attention to the book’s mechanics. The stilted dialogue in Eve’s memories, Q’s overlooked “penchant” for long absences – it’s debatable whether Someday, Maybe’s first-person narration is supposed to sow questions about reliability or absorb weak points in the narrative. Ironically, this debate produces a greater truth if not the novel’s conclusion: what we know about a person is just the story we believe.

LATEST STORIES