Claire Thomas

There is a celebrated moment in Jonathan Glazer’s 2004 film Birth when Nicole Kidman enters a theatre late and sits down to watch a performance of Wagner’s Die Walküre. The camera remains on her perturbed features for two whole minutes. This image kept recurring as I read Claire Thomas’s new novel, The Performance. In it, three women sit and watch a production of Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days (1961), alone in their thoughts, their whirring minds only occasionally distracted by the actions on stage. If for nothing else, Thomas must be congratulated on the boldness of her conceit, on her ability to make dynamic a situation of complete stasis.

In chapter fifteen of Middlemarch (1871–72), George Eliot writes about the germination of literary passion: ‘Most of us who turn to any subject we love remember some morning or evening hour when we got on a high stool to reach down an untried volume … as the first traceable beginning of our love.’ Rebecca Mead’s book on her own engagement with Middlemarch captures this experience of burgeoning intellectual desire: the rush of recognition a reader can feel upon first encountering a novel, and the enduring relevance a beloved book might offer as its contents transform through frequent readings.