Rachel Joyce’s Perfect follows two tragic tales separated by 40 years

In many ways, Rachel Joyce’s second novel, Perfect, is the opposite of her first. Some critics called The Unlikely Pilgrimage Of Harold Fry, which followed a middle-aged man walking across all of England to visit an old friend, overly twee and whimsical. But in her attempts to shake things up, Joyce shifted too far on the emotional spectrum with Perfect, a dark and constrained novel that’s beautifully written, but too painful to love.
Perfect’s narrative alternates between the perspectives of Byron, a young boy living in the British countryside in 1972, and Jim, a man with crippling obsessive-compulsive disorder who lives in the same area during the modern day. Jim’s chapters are a strange fusion between a tragic look at the treatment of the mentally ill and a workplace comedy complete with weird co-workers and desperate attempts to increase traffic and build morale at the grocery-store café where he works. Joyce showed an incredible sensitivity and understanding when she wrote about the impact of mental illness in Harold Fry, and that talent shines even brighter now that she’s devoting more space to the subject.