MAY CONTAIN NUTS
By John O’Farrell
Black Swan. £6.99
ISBN 0 55277 162 7
I guess you don’t try to get to sleep at night by popping bubble wrap. Alice Chaplin, John O’Farrell’s main character in May Contain Nuts does.
She lies awake fretting about secondary school transfer, dairy allergies and road safety, and she tries to bust her stress by popping bubble wrap. Alice lives in a nice, affluent street in South London, but the terrifying world of the council estate she wants to close her eyes to is just down the road. She confesses that she’d like to keep her children inside a ‘giant version of the rain cover that used to unfold over their push chair’. But at the same time she is locked in a desperately competitive world of parenting, testing her four-year-old on what the different instruments represent in Peter and the Wolf, and going to listen to readers at primary school to spy on her own child. The pinnacle of her neurotic competitiveness sees her eventually disguising herself to take her daughter’s school entrance exam in her place. She emerges (unnoticed) as the winner of a scholarship and then the fun really begins.
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