Small Is Beautiful

I often want to recommend a novel by the British writer Jonathan Buckley but struggle to choose. His books are small-scale, a touch eccentric. They are discreetly experimental but also unfashionably traditional in their dedication to inhabiting other consciousnesses. They do not style themselves as showstoppers. Which one of these subtle, touching novels is guaranteed to live up to my ardent report?Buckley’s most recent book is on the face of it his humblest yet. Even its oracular title, One Boat, gives off an air of bathos. It is narrated by Teresa, a contract lawyer in her forties who has come to a small town on the Greek coast for a solo holiday. Her father has just died; she is here to accomplish what she calls, in her wooden way, some “thought-ordering.” Teresa is, by her own account, not a natural raconteur. The “suboptimally passionate” daughter of a mathematics prodigy, she is “an exam-passer par excellence” who “followed the straight path”—an “analyst, not a performer,” with an “underpowered” imagination. “Lord, no,” she replies when a neighboring diner asks whether she is a writer. She chose the town because it is an ordinary backwater—not “too neatly picturesque” or tour...