Boyd’s latest novel–his seventh–purports to be the journal, complete with footnotes, editor’s notes and an index, of one Logan Mountstuart, a log of his life from prep school in the ’20s to his death in 1991. But Boyd systematically destabilizes the closed world in which his hero moves. Mountstuart floats through the 20th century, bumping into greatness (Hemingway, Jackson Pollock, Virginia Woolf) without ever rising to greatness himself. Instead, his journal bears gentle and often eloquent witness to a world that seems a little more foreign with every entry, as when he writes in 1936, “The King died last night and Kipling died last week… You grow accustomed to these old men being around, always aware of their presence in the background of your life. Then they’re gone and there’s a bit less noise in the room, you look around to see who’s missing.” Melancholy but always engaging, “Any Human Heart” is a pleasure front to back, and a fond tip of the bowler hat to the upper-class fiction spawned by a long-gone world. On page 140, Mountstuart tells us the name of his tailor.
