I Think I Love You by Allison Pearson: review
Allison Pearson's I Think I Love You stirs the forgotten teeny-bopper in Jane Shilling
June 20, 2010
By Jane Shilling
http://www.telegraph.co.uk
There is a generation of women for whom the name David has an almost mystical resonance. Fiftyish now, well embedded in middle age (to their own rueful astonishment), they have lost or relinquished most of the trappings of youth and are heading, a little bruised and distinctly reluctant, towards the grim realm that lies beyond 60.
But middle age, like adolescence, is a time of change and turbulence, and it takes very little - a name, a few bars of music - to turn a middle-aged lady back into a teenager consumed with puppy love who spent entire physics lessons doodling the name of David Cassidy on her rough book.
The heroine of Allison Pearson's second novel was such a teenager. Petra Williams was not called after the Blue Peter dog, but after the Rose-Red city by her mother, who is German and has social aspirations. This does not prevent the boys at her school in South Wales from barking when register is called.
'You might say that my mother's whole life was a battle to keep the vulgar and the ugly at bay', Petra reflects. Unluckily, the considerable list of things that Petra's mother regards as vulgar includes her daughter's grand passion: David Cassidy.
Holy writ for a true believer in David is The Essential David Cassidy Magazine, whose newest recruit, William Finn, does a fine line in writing David's regular 'personal' letter to his fans. William, a would-be rock musician with an acerbic girlfriend who reserves her particular scorn for David Cassidy, is mortified by his job. He has no real idea of the awe with which his callow maunderings are devoured by David fans. Not until he encounters 30,000 of them at the infamous White City concert of 1974, where a young girl died in the crush, does he realise the power of puppy love.
Pearson's ingeniously structured narrative cuts between Petra's provincial Seventies adolescence and her disillusioned middle age at a perfect pitch of sweet, intricately detailed nostalgia, concluding with a late-blooming love affair so outrageously feel-good that it will bring a tear to the most rapacious Hollywood film producer's eye.
The effect is both addictive and strangely evanescent, like candyfloss or cheap music. In other hands it might have been cloying, but Pearson (a former Cassidy fan herself) has such an elegant way with sentimentality that even Donny Osmond fanciers will find themselves beguiled.
I Think I Love You
By Allison Pearson
