I’ll cut straight to it – Upstairs at the Party by Linda Grant was a massive disappointment.

The right ingredients were there – campus-lit, a tight group of friends, an incident that disrupts their university bliss – all with a seventies backdrop. What I actually got was a story as bland as the drab concrete buildings that populated Grant’s imagined campus.

The story begins with promise, when we learn about the main character, Adele’s, father – he’s charismatic and interesting, and she describes him in indulgent terms –

From my father I learned that when men were around there was more of everything, more luxury and abundance…

But her father gets caught orchestrating a ‘very basic Ponzi scheme’ and takes his own life. Adele likens the loss to experiencing an earthquake or tsunami, and is soon forced to find work. Fearing she will never leave their small town, she successfully applies for a scholarship to university. There she meets a number of people, most significant of which is a glamorous and androgynous couple known collectively as Evie/Stevie.

If you go back and look at your life there are certain scenes, acts, or maybe just incidents, on which everything that follows seems to depend.

The story follows Adele for a number of decades, and examines how her university experience and her friendship with Evie/Stevie shapes her life.

Overall, the characters in this novel are flat, largely indistinguishable from each other and very difficult to care about. Furthermore, dialogue is wooden and forced. I pushed on because I wanted to know what happened ‘upstairs at the party’ (the party is midway through the book). And then I kept going because I expected that Grant would find some interesting parallels between what occurs at the party and Adele’s formative years. Needless to say, my expectations were not met. Instead, there was a weak plot twist related to a man Adele is in a relationship with, and some missing notebooks. These are the bits that carried the story to the end.

There were odd repetitions (such as three mentions of Melba toast and six of Esperanto language) and the inclusion of useless details that did not add to to the story (for example why dog poo was white in the seventies). I’m not sure if Grant intended these details to anchor the narrative in whatever decade she was up to, but it didn’t work. They simply stood out as repetitive or superfluous. Other reference points – hippie fashion in the seventies, the AIDS crisis in the eighties – were stock standard, and Grant offered nothing new.

At a stretch, something might be said for Grant’s treatment of how our values in young adulthood change as we age. She observes that campus life offered a simplicity that the characters failed to appreciate at the time –

Odd that we clamoured for freedom and already had it, in the form of out-of-order telephone boxes and second-class mail.

And later in the book –

This freedom you wanted is an illusion, it’s nothing to do with you, it’s about being young. It’s all about your unlined face and perky tits.

I suspect there’s something to debate in that last quote (not the bits about unlined faces and perky tits, but whether freedom is the domain of the young) but honestly, I don’t want to spend another moment on this book.

1.5/5 Dull.

My father was life, vitality, central heating turned on, platters of grilled chops and Waldorf salad and fancy chocolates in boxes tied with a ribbon.