By Jessica Anthony
Transworld Publishers, Paperback, £9.99
On an unseasonably warm Sunday in November 1957, housewife Kathleen Beckett decides she does not want to go to church with her family, as all middle-class American families ought to. Instead, she decides to go for a swim in the disused pool of their apartment complex. And there she stays, refusing to come out, to the surprise of her husband, and children, and the neighbours, and Kathleen herself.
It is a small, precise and seemingly casual act of rebellion, but over the course of the day it prompts Kathleen and her husband, Virgil, to quietly, yet individually, unravel and examine their marriage, the choices they made, the choices made for them, and whether the secrets they are keeping from each other are worth keeping any more.
At only 144 pages, all appearances point toward a slight book. This is far from that. Jessica Anthony seems to be a secret too well kept: a storyteller that can deftly conjure whole inner worlds and entire lives through a word count that would barely serve a couple of chapters for the abundance of verbose authors. And she should not be, because she is brilliant – concise but not curt, efficient but not minimalist, structuring a narrative around characters and their responses to the situations they find themselves in.
In The Most, the Becketts’ marriage and their individual motivations are peeled back, revealing mid-century malaise, misogyny, thwarted ambition, grief, lust, class, and the extent to which either spouse is willing to accept responsibility for how their lives have turned out. It’s a single-sitting gem of a book that deserves, and will get, much more of your attention than you realise.