SOURCE: Yardley, Jonathan. “Bleak, Blue-Collar and British.” Washington Post Book World (29 October 1997): D2.

In the following review, Yardley regards An Advent Calendar as a proletariat novel.

No doubt about it, this is a very strange novel. Written by a British novelist who has published numerous other books, it ventures into territory not often occupied by the novel, which is in essence a middle-class institution. An Advent Calendar by contrast is working-class fiction: not proletarian, guided by political and/or ideological purposes, but descriptive and empathetic, a look inside a world that is familiar to few regular readers of conventional fiction.

Shena Mackay sets the tone immediately. John, a young married man in difficult economic circumstances, stops by the butcher's for a bit of meat to share with his uncle, Cecil, with whom he and his small, unhappy family are temporarily lodging. He buys ground meat, which at home...