How Do People Stay the Same Author: Mark Bowles ISBN-13: 9781913111755Publisher: Galley Beggar PressGuideline Price: £11.99, 180 pp While autobiographical in nature, Mark Bowles’s second novel does without life’s hallmark events. “Canonically big events” don’t import meaning into our lives, according to narrator Patrick Boyd. It’s life’s borderless events “which pass unrecognised, unheeded, unnamed” that develop and mark us. Patrick the “belated recipient of [his] own experience”, yearns to make sense of his days, and rather than relying on cryptic memories, he reads through his diaries in reverse, from adulthood to adolescence, hoping to unearth concrete proof of who, and how, he has been.Patrick travels through familiar territory, and the end goal of his depressive teenage years is always in sight, but the novel’s reverse chronology manages “a different kind of expectation”, in which reminiscences form set-ups, scars become wounds and the foresight afforded can make for guilty reading. Patrick’s excitement about the end of torrid relationships is inevitably followed by him suffering them. His enthusiasm is infectious, but readers know it to be a spent force in the near future. Above all, this technique endears Patrick to readers, who will cheer for the small victories the past lacks but his future holds, and in darker moments, wish to shower Patrick with reassurances about his future contentment. What can often be a cheap narrative trick is well woven into the plot, which is cognisant of the past’s tendency to invade the present, and the clues to be found in the former.How Do People Stay the Same’s titular question remains unsolved. Distant selves are “proof enough that we are not one but many people in succession”. Is there a “thin graphene layer of self”, a sustaining thread running between the depressive teenager and the adult? Beyond scraps of remembered verse and vague aspirations, there’s scant evidence. Patrick dreams of stepping back into past versions of himself, so that unconvincing instantiations might ring true again. How Do People Stay the Same is a tender novel, whose meditations on the self’s uncertain parameters urge excavating the past to better understand the present. A misremembered couplet is insufficient evidence of Patrick’s continuity, but a reminder that living is rarely chronological; “the hands of a clock in an old Jewish ghetto go backwards / and you too step in reverse through your life”.Colm McKenna is a writer based in Paris