The Importance of Being Seven

July 16, 2012
With the arrival of the sixth novel (after Bertie Plays the Blues) in his 44 Scotland Street series, McCall Smith again shows his mastery of light comedy. The residents of 44 Scotland Street are quickly introduced: art dealer Matthew and his new bride, Elspeth; Irene Pollock, husband Stuart, precocious son Bertie, and pretentiously named baby Ulysses; painter Angus Lordie (and his faithful, heroic dog, Cyril); the “private scholar” and freelance anthropologist Domenica Macdonald; plus other, minor characters, notably the philosophizing cafe proprietress Big Lou. The plot lines are many: Elspeth’s pregnancy; Angus and Domenica might be falling in love; and Bertie, approaching the titular important age, needs to feel like a boy, though his monstrous but well-meaning mother is too busy introducing him to the poetry of W.H. Auden and creating Oedipal issues. McCall’s brilliance lies in his ability to juggle so much in a way that feels seamless, even if the narrative arcs themselves tend to the fanciful. The drama may be slight, but what pulls the reader in is the good natures of (almost) all the characters and McCall’s uncanny ability to see their world as they do, and to render their worries, pleasures, and musings with charm, grace, and geniality. Agent: Robin Straus.

August 1, 2012
85 more snapshots of the tenants of 44 Scotland Street and their friends and lovers. Now that crime kingpin Lard O'Connor has been taken out of the deck (The Unbearable Lightness of Scones, 2010, etc.), life moves on a more even keel for the citizens of Edinburgh. Pregnant ex-schoolteacher Elspeth Harmony and her bridegroom Matthew, owner of the Something Special Gallery, look at a bigger and much more expensive flat in Moray Place. Anthropologist Domenica Macdonald's friend Antonia Collie invites Domenica and their mutual friend, painter Angus Lordie, to share her villa in the Tuscan hills. Surveyor Bruce Anderson, who's broken many hearts already, gets engaged to Lizzie Todd, his boss' daughter, but a scheme Lizzie's friend Diane concocts to test Bruce's motives backfires spectacularly. Matthew's ex-employee and ex-girlfriend, art history student Pat Macgregor, informs him that her part-time replacement, the beautiful Kirsty, is a member of Women's Revenge--he must fire her but dares not. Most of these plotlines are slender stuff; some are wound up with featherweight insouciance or not at all. By far, the most rewarding pages are devoted to Bertie Pollock, the matter-of-fact 6-year-old who hatches a plan to take his baby brother Ulysses in for show and tell. A pair of climatic voyages yield very different results. Antonia, finally face to face with the treasures of the Uffizi Gallery, comes down with Stendhal Syndrome; Bertie, who yearns in vain to turn 7 and earn some measure of respect, is graced with a magical fishing trip with his put-upon father. Another charming demonstration that it's better to travel hopefully than to arrive--a motto that might stand for every soap opera ever written.

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Starred review from June 1, 2012
Becoming seven is of aching importance to Bertie Pollock, who has been an unhappy six-year-old in the five previous 44 Scotland Street novels. To Bertie, whose mother seems to see him as more of a product than an actual child, the age of seven seems to offer so much more freedom than six ever has. Bertie, who performs an endless round of self-improvement exercises, has a loving but timid father and a baby brother, Ulysses, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Bertie's former psychotherapist. The maternally overmanaged Pollock family occupies one flat on 44 Scotland Street in the New Town neighborhood of Edinburgh. Fans of the series (which McCall Smith conducts in daily installments in the Scotsman before book publication) will rejoice at hearing again some of the familiar treads on the fashionable tenement's stairs. Returning are residents of Scotland Street including the cultural anthropologist Domenica Macdonald, who lives just upstairs of the Pollocks; visitors to Scotland Street, like the portrait artist Angus Lordie; and some former Scotland Street residents, including the young woman, Pat Macgregor, who once lived in the same flat as the narcissist Bruce Anderson, whose beauty forces admiration from all women, some men, and always himself, sometimes at great cost. By following an assemblage of characters on and near 44 Scotland Street, McCall Smith manages sidesplitting send-ups of contemporary pretentiousness and wry and often poignant commentary on the roles of chance, cruelty, and fate in our lives. The whole production, unlike Bertie's hothouse childhood, is delightful. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: McCall Smith's Ladies Detective Agency series has long been his most popular, but the Scotland-set novels are hot on Mmm Precious Ramotse's formidable tail.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)