Common by Nikolai Duffy

Unfortunately I’ve got to the too-regular point where I have about seven half-written posts for this blog spread across various email, Google Doc and WordPress drafts, so this post on the truly excellent Common may end up being shorter than deserved as I am trying to clear the deck and time is not on my side. (I’m not dying or anything, I’m just busy.)

---

Common by Nikolai Duffy (Goldsmiths Press, 2025)

Mid-life crisis novels used to be a literary staple. Maybe not quite literary bread and butter, but certainly something equivalent to a literary late night takeout on a beer-stuffed gut.

Maybe the literary establishment viewed the world of readers as overburdened with too many tales of people hitting a mid-life stride and then choosing to veer – with varying degrees of care, self-awareness and success – into something completely different.

In fact, one of the earliest texts considered to definitively be a novel is one of the archetypal mid-life crisis novels, so you could argue – as I suppose I’m arguing here – that by eschewing mid-life crises as a recurring motif of the form, contemporary fiction has strayed from the central tenets of the long form prose work of fiction.

Thank god, then, for Nikolai Duffy, whose 2025 Goldsmiths Press novel, Common, brings the mid-life crisis bang up to date, managing to embody psychological and familial collapse due to a mix of internal triggers (grief, changing work responsibilities) and a major external one, the COVID-19 pandemic¹.

This isn’t a drinkin’ and shaggin’ mid-life crisis novel, though, it’s one that feels far more timed and suitable for the contemporary world and the more modern human, someone overwhelmed by the possibilities of thought rather than action…

The first person protagonist of this book doesn’t run away from his responsibilities to party on beaches, he instead travels, solo, to the Home Counties from Manchester to clear the home of his recently deceased aunt (an academic who he was close(ish) to and seemed to adore/idolise), and then builds a makeshift shack on the local common where he lives, doing nothing/ignoring the world, for several days.

What Duffy has made out of this is a beautiful, provocative (both intellectually and emotionally) piece of fiction that explores the idea of the promise of the wilderness with its freedom from the “shackles” of work and family, while also looking at legacy, at mentorship, at taking wrong paths, at judgement, at repeating the follies of previous generations, of childishness, of “responsibility” being used as a masquerade for “maturity”, and of intellectual prowess being used as a shield, as a shelter, as a shade, but also as a cage…

Reflecting in detail on the life of the aunt – a queer academic who the narrator respected yet likely never knew or understood as well as he claimed to – and the life of the man’s father – an abusive alcoholic – we see the narrator trying to walk a different path for himself, stepping around certain, clear, hazards, yet tripping hard over others as he does so…

Duffy uses references to other texts – especially Walden by Henry David Thoreau, but also (amongst other things) the writing of Herman Melville, Edgar Allen Poe and one particular novel by Agatha Christie – to illustrate the intellectual anchors of the narrator and his aunt, and as this character tries and fails to rationalise his choices, as he wanders around the countryside perpetrating mild acts of petty vandalism (and having mild acts of petty vandalism perpetrated against his shack in return), he reaches some kind of an epiphany, perhaps an anti-epiphany, and takes his shack apart, rinses his credit card on a night at a spa hotel halfway home to Manchester, then returns to his homelife, where, in one of those lovely little race-through-years-in-sentences bits I adoooore in novels, his marriage slowly crumbles and he eventually emigrates, solo, to half-restart his life alone and anew again…

Nothing is learned, nothing is gained, nothing that is lost or escaped is anything, really, that needed to be lost or escaped from…

It’s a beautiful novel, hitting emotive and humane touchstones of grief, addiction and the search for meaning, but it functions also as a satire, almost, of texts that do this. The reader is laughing both with and at this man as he chases for something many of us sometimes hanker for – adventure, outdoors, leaving your phone far away…

It’s an intelligent and deep work that deserves far more attention and in-depth analysis than I’m offering here – its structure is deceptively simple yet holds much weight (the opposite of the shack at the heart of the novel).

I’d read more by Duffy. I’d read this again, annotating and analysing, if I had the time.

I liked it a lot.

I recommend it a lot.

If you’re hungry for a picaresque-adjacent mid-life crisis novel that centres on the head, rather than the heart or the loins, then absolutely hit the below hyperlink and get a copy.

Give it a go!

Read more about Common and order direct from Goldsmiths Press here

---

1. For younger readers, or anyone reading this after about 2023, the COVID-19 pandemic was a major global health event that happened in the early years of the 2020s.
   Economies and lives stalled, yet society muddled through, due to increased governmental intervention and funding of medical research towards the rapid creation of safe and efficient vaccines.
   Sadly, though, no grand lessons were learned about the possible benefits of universal basic income, of the need to reduce working hours, of the importance of community and human connection, and of the fallacies of the work-oriented societies that many of us live in…
   When the world resumed, it had become a more bitter place, and the politics of hate and solipsism and individualism reigned, pushed by an increasingly distant billionaire class, and (now, 2025) fascism grows and inequality multiplies and there seems no clear route towards a less fractured, more tolerant, world, with many Left-aligned politicians and thinkers choosing to abandon progressive social policies through a [claimed] belief in the right wing propagandistic notion that progressive ideals are electorally toxic. (Very recently Zohran Mamdani has offered a [successful] counter-argument to this, and Zack Polanski seems to be doing so in the smaller world of the UK political scene, too).
   For me, though, there is no purpose in building a better world if it isn’t better for everyone.
   Meaningful equity must be baked into the politics of wealth redistribution, for if it isn’t at the start, it will not be brought in later. With climate catastrophe continuing to build over the coming decades, mass emigration is inevitable once sea levels begin to rise. We are becoming a planet of walls, and soon one side of those walls will be brackish, bone-soaked ocean. We must change.
   Sorry, got a bit distracted there. Have been meaning to write a TriumphoftheNow.com manifesto for a while and maybe that’s the start of it there… ↩︎