AustLit

'This is the third novel in Steven Carroll’s T. S. Eliot collection, inspired by the poet’s famous Four Quartets series. Here, he interrogates the perspective of Eliot’s secret platonic mistress, the somewhat doomed Emily Hale, who we meet as a lonely eccentric self-described spinster in her late 70s, reflecting on the love that never was. The novel moves between the present-day Hale in 1965, having just learnt of Eliot’s death, to the beginnings of their celibate affair in 1913, and meanders off momentarily into a benign subplot involving two younger characters named Grace and Ted that does very little to enlighten or enhance an otherwise compelling narrative.' (Introduction)

'In his fiction, Steven Carroll stretches and slows time. He combines this with deliberate over-explaining and repetition, the echoing of memories and ideas, coincidence, and theatricality. A distinctive rhythm results: when reading his work, I often find myself nodding in time to the words. Occasionally – and it happens now and again in his new novel, A New England Affair – the prose starts to resemble a pizza with too many toppings. Mostly, though, Carroll’s approach to fiction succeeds even when it seemingly shouldn’t. If it’s a mystery – a minor miracle, even – that the various techniques he employs come together to create stylised and yet fresh prose, then that mystery itself becomes part of the pleasure of reading a Carroll novel.' (Introduction)