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‘I wanted my second novel to be a love-letter, a paean, to Gloucestershire and to the English countryside’.

Many writers have declared that creativity cannot be rushed. Producing a work of creative genius is a process that cannot be hurried along by impatience, instead one must wait for the answers and inspiration to drift into one’s mind then patiently refine such ideas into a masterpiece. For Richard Aronowitz such a suggestion is certainly true as he spent over four years completing his latest novel ‘It’s Just the Beating of my Heart’.

Following a childhood in which Aronowitz fell in love with the rural idyll of the Gloucestershire countryside, he wanted his second novel to be ‘a love-letter, a paean, to Gloucestershire and to the English countryside’. In fact so vital is the Gloucestershire landscape to the book, it is almost a character in itself. Aronowitz insists that ‘apart from those closest to me, nature and the English countryside are what I love most’.

But far from creating a romantic homage to all that is natural, Aronowitz realised that the only way to truly capture the essence of the English countryside in his work would be ‘through the eyes of a lonely and isolated man who drew solace from the landscape’. This lonely and isolated man comes in the form of John Stack, an alcoholic in denial, struggling to cope with his wife leaving him and only seeing his daughter on alternate weekends. Aronowitz succeeds in using nature to provide ‘a kind of solace and spiritual resource to John Stack’, much as it had in Aronowitz’s own life. Although Aronowitz never wallows in self pity, clearly stating that he ‘like almost every other adult’ has experienced loss, his mother died when he was twenty-one so he drew from the emotions of this and ‘the pain of past relationship break-ups, to conjure some of the numbness and detachment that John displays’.

For John Stack every aspect of his life has been lived, appreciated, remembered and endured alongside the Gloucestershire countryside. His daughter’s favourite walk is re-trodden every weekend leading ‘deeper and deeper into a no-man’s lands of pasture and rough ground’. He prefers to navigate ‘through the maze of high-hedged lanes, Cotswold dry-stone-walled roads and blind turns’ of country lanes than the quicker and more direct route of the main road. The scattered villages of Gloucestershire, which John chooses to walk between have ‘a feeling of otherworldly remoteness, of isolation’ that reflect his own inner turmoil.

Like a country walk that you love revisiting, that you need to finish as soon as possible because the best bit is just before you reach home, It’s Just the Beating of My Heart is an emotional meander through the countryside where the last chapter forces you to retrace your steps and take the walk all over again.

Christian House, “No more half measures,” in The Independent on Sunday, 4^th April 2010

In his first novel Five Amber Beads, Richard Aronowitz trained his pictorial prose on the torn canvas of the Holocaust. It explored the retention of a familial history through understanding the fate of relatives and the more prosaic act of regaining ownership of Nazi-looted art. This was fitting for a writer whose day job at Sotheby's sees him dissect the dubious provenance of masterpieces. However, for his second, It's Just the Beating of my Heart, Aronowitz has moved beyond such affirmative closure to focus on what remains of a life when what has been lost simply cannot be restituted. As a study of a man teetering on the brink of insanity, it is a beautifully assured piece of work.

John Stack is a man bereft of love. He withdrew into a life of drink, work and ponderous country walks when his family left him, and two years later, things aren't exactly on the up. Business at his Mayfair art gallery is dropping in inverse proportion to his alcohol intake. While his wife stays well away, the sporadic visits to his Cotswold home of his 12-year-old-daughter prove a lifeline. Aronowitz has a perfect eye and ear for the tenderness bartered between father and daughter. However, Stack's weekdays are measured in glugs and refills. "The first glass takes the edge off the chill, the second ignites a fire that spreads its warmth outwards from my belly; by the third glass I feel that I am in perfect company."

The tipple soon has competition for his affections. In glide the slender breeches of Nicola, the mysterious widow who owns the hefty Georgian pile in his village. She's straight out of du Maurier, the kind of woman possessed of wicked duvet-moves yet equally nifty with her secateurs. Their romance is a playful waltz among the hedgerows and copses, yet their happiness is a guttering flame. Suspicion over the facts surrounding the death of Nicola's husband eats away at Stack, and then there are those anonymous midnight phone calls. What was a melancholy character study morphs into something more sinister. "What if Nicola is not what she seems to be?" Stack frets. From here on, the affair is a balancing act of lust and mistrust.

This is a quiet novel which progresses at a pace as gentle as a wide brook but with the attached depth of still waters. The narrowing of Stack's existence is handled with both structural clarity and psychological truth, while a potentially annoying narrator who becomes a slave to self-destructive patterns never loses the reader's sympathy. It is also a book about the consolations of nature. Stack finds palliative care in "the great canopies of elm and beech, the ancient gnarled trunks of oak and hawthorn, the generosity of walnut-tree and chestnut". His solitary walks through the Gloucestershire woodland prove an effective motif for a tale of a man searching for a new path.

Alfred Hickling, “It’s Just the Beating of My Heart”, in The Guardian, 29^th May 2010

John Stack is a disaffected art dealer who likes a drink. “Drinking is to me what golf is to a golfing pro or skydiving is to a skydiving champion. I want to master it, to hone my sipping, my savouring skills.” Needless to say, he doesn’t think he has a problem; but when his wife and daughter abandon their Cotswold cottage one Christmas, Stack is left to hone his sipping skills and extend his talent for ham-fisted metaphors: “My thoughts go round like a game of swing ball. I send them out into the ether and they come back at me with a lateral wallop but go nowhere.” Redemption arrives in the form of Nicola, an attractive widow who sympathises with his situation “echolalically” (which doesn’t appear in my Oxford Compact, so I can’t help you there, unless he means echoically, which doesn’t make sense.) But given the choice between a single woman and a single malt, Stacks opts for the latter. Aronowitz saves his revelatory denouement for the final page, though the chances are that you’ll have given up long before then.


				it's just the beating of my heart



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		THE FIRST CAPITAL CONNECT BOOK CLUB'S "BOOK OF THE MONTH" FOR MAY 2010 Richard Aronowitz's book [...] exploits to a large degree our complacent assumptions about what can happen in a conventional literary novel or how psychology operates [...] Aronowitz's book has pulled off a clever piece of sleight of hand (Tom Sutcliffe, The Independent) A beautifully assured piece of work (Christian House, The Independent on Sunday) Like a country walk that you love revisiting, that you need to finish as soon as possible because the best bit is just before you reach home, It’s Just the Beating of My Heart is an emotional meander through the countryside where the last chapter forces you to retrace your steps and take the walk all over again (Laura Pilcher, The Hub magazine online) [Aronowitz's] new book is a very fine novel indeed (Tom Cunliffe, www.acommonreader.org) As a study of loss, loneliness and hope it has plenty to say, in prose that is shot through with the sparkle and description one would hope to find from a poet (William Rycroft, www.justwilliamsluck.blogspot.com) A Common Reader full review Just William's Luck full review



		Richard Aronowitz's deflated art dealer finds comfort in booze and a beautiful neighbour (The Jewish Chronicle) Given the choice between a single woman and a single malt, Stack opts for the latter... Aronowitz saves his revelatory denouement for the final page (Alfred Hickling, The Guardian) You can buy the book on Amazon now by following this link:



		Amazon *Laura Pilcher, The Hub* magazine (online)** ‘I wanted my second novel to be a love-letter, a paean, to Gloucestershire and to the English countryside’. Many writers have declared that creativity cannot be rushed. Producing a work of creative genius is a process that cannot be hurried along by impatience, instead one must wait for the answers and inspiration to drift into one’s mind then patiently refine such ideas into a masterpiece. For Richard Aronowitz such a suggestion is certainly true as he spent over four years completing his latest novel ‘It’s Just the Beating of my Heart’. Following a childhood in which Aronowitz fell in love with the rural idyll of the Gloucestershire countryside, he wanted his second novel to be ‘a love-letter, a paean, to Gloucestershire and to the English countryside’. In fact so vital is the Gloucestershire landscape to the book, it is almost a character in itself. Aronowitz insists that ‘apart from those closest to me, nature and the English countryside are what I love most’. But far from creating a romantic homage to all that is natural, Aronowitz realised that the only way to truly capture the essence of the English countryside in his work would be ‘through the eyes of a lonely and isolated man who drew solace from the landscape’. This lonely and isolated man comes in the form of John Stack, an alcoholic in denial, struggling to cope with his wife leaving him and only seeing his daughter on alternate weekends. Aronowitz succeeds in using nature to provide ‘a kind of solace and spiritual resource to John Stack’, much as it had in Aronowitz’s own life. Although Aronowitz never wallows in self pity, clearly stating that he ‘like almost every other adult’ has experienced loss, his mother died when he was twenty-one so he drew from the emotions of this and ‘the pain of past relationship break-ups, to conjure some of the numbness and detachment that John displays’. For John Stack every aspect of his life has been lived, appreciated, remembered and endured alongside the Gloucestershire countryside. His daughter’s favourite walk is re-trodden every weekend leading ‘deeper and deeper into a no-man’s lands of pasture and rough ground’. He prefers to navigate ‘through the maze of high-hedged lanes, Cotswold dry-stone-walled roads and blind turns’ of country lanes than the quicker and more direct route of the main road. The scattered villages of Gloucestershire, which John chooses to walk between have ‘a feeling of otherworldly remoteness, of isolation’ that reflect his own inner turmoil. Like a country walk that you love revisiting, that you need to finish as soon as possible because the best bit is just before you reach home, It’s Just the Beating of My Heart is an emotional meander through the countryside where the last chapter forces you to retrace your steps and take the walk all over again. Tom Sutcliffe, “The bitter ending”, in The Independent, 12^th March 2010 In what circumstances is it acceptable for a work of art to cheat us? Or, to put it another way, why is that we sometimes complain that a novel or a film has taken us for a ride ("colloq. to tease, to mislead deliberately, to hoax, to cheat") while at other times we celebrate the fact that we have been taken for a ride ("device on which one rides at an amusement park or fair"). I ask the question in the light of a localised cluster of twist endings – two of them in recently published novels and one at the conclusion of Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island. I might as well confess right away that I don't know what the twist is in the case of the Scorsese film, only that there is one and that it has provoked yelps of complaint from those who have seen the film. Comparisons have been drawn with The Sixth Sense – and they haven't always been flattering to Scorsese. These days it would be easy enough to find out what the twist is; just Google and it's there, helpfully flagged with a spoiler warning. But since I haven't yet seen Shutter Island I can't quite bear to do it to myself. I know, logically, that any film that isn't worth seeing twice isn't worth seeing once, so it really shouldn't matter. And I know that the high-minded cineaste shouldn't invest so much in big-dipper narrative jolts. But I want to guess for myself. And that, I suppose, is part of the answer to the question. We don't mind when everything about a project warns us in advance that there may be trapdoors beneath our feet. Shutter Island is a knowing exercise in gothic film – a genre in which the fireplace that suddenly swivels to reveal an unsuspected corridor isn't a breach of narrative ethics but an indispensable pleasure. It's a little different when what you're consuming conceals its own purposes more carefully. I have to proceed cautiously, because I have no wish to throw up spoilers, but I think it's safe to say that neither Tim Pears's novel Landed nor Richard Aronowitz's book It's Just the Beating of My Heart end in a place that one in ten thousand of their readers will have predicted. Indeed, they exploit to a large degree our complacent assumptions about what can happen in a conventional literary novel – or how psychology operates. They exploit our assumption that if it isn't mentioned it isn't important, which means that a novelist doesn't always have to actively conceal things. In both cases I felt a stab of irritation on discovering what the novelist had known for some time but I hadn't. Curiously, it persists with the Aronowitz novel in a way that it hasn't with the Tim Pears, and it isn't very easy to say why. Neither of them shamelessly cheats – in the sense of breaking an internal logic or creating false witnesses. And the Tim Pears novel can even reasonably claim that it explicitly tells the reader what is going on. But, whereas one feels that Aronowitz's book has pulled off a clever piece of sleight of hand, and is broadly exhausted by that discovery, the Pears unsettles in quite a different way. Perhaps it's just that I guessed too early in the Aronowitz – and saw the smoke and mirrors before the conjuror reached his "reveal". Perhaps its just that I still can't decide what to make of Pears's ending and have suspended a verdict in the interim. But I think it may be this: you suspect Aronowitz's novel is built around its twist and wouldn't exist otherwise. With Pears's book you get the oddest sense that the novelist may have been as surprised by his readers by what finally happened. One is a trick (and a good one). The other is a mystery, which is something else altogether. *Christian House, “No more half measures,” in The Independent on Sunday, 4^th April 2010* In his first novel Five Amber Beads, Richard Aronowitz trained his pictorial prose on the torn canvas of the Holocaust. It explored the retention of a familial history through understanding the fate of relatives and the more prosaic act of regaining ownership of Nazi-looted art. This was fitting for a writer whose day job at Sotheby's sees him dissect the dubious provenance of masterpieces. However, for his second, It's Just the Beating of my Heart, Aronowitz has moved beyond such affirmative closure to focus on what remains of a life when what has been lost simply cannot be restituted. As a study of a man teetering on the brink of insanity, it is a beautifully assured piece of work. John Stack is a man bereft of love. He withdrew into a life of drink, work and ponderous country walks when his family left him, and two years later, things aren't exactly on the up. Business at his Mayfair art gallery is dropping in inverse proportion to his alcohol intake. While his wife stays well away, the sporadic visits to his Cotswold home of his 12-year-old-daughter prove a lifeline. Aronowitz has a perfect eye and ear for the tenderness bartered between father and daughter. However, Stack's weekdays are measured in glugs and refills. "The first glass takes the edge off the chill, the second ignites a fire that spreads its warmth outwards from my belly; by the third glass I feel that I am in perfect company." The tipple soon has competition for his affections. In glide the slender breeches of Nicola, the mysterious widow who owns the hefty Georgian pile in his village. She's straight out of du Maurier, the kind of woman possessed of wicked duvet-moves yet equally nifty with her secateurs. Their romance is a playful waltz among the hedgerows and copses, yet their happiness is a guttering flame. Suspicion over the facts surrounding the death of Nicola's husband eats away at Stack, and then there are those anonymous midnight phone calls. What was a melancholy character study morphs into something more sinister. "What if Nicola is not what she seems to be?" Stack frets. From here on, the affair is a balancing act of lust and mistrust. This is a quiet novel which progresses at a pace as gentle as a wide brook but with the attached depth of still waters. The narrowing of Stack's existence is handled with both structural clarity and psychological truth, while a potentially annoying narrator who becomes a slave to self-destructive patterns never loses the reader's sympathy. It is also a book about the consolations of nature. Stack finds palliative care in "the great canopies of elm and beech, the ancient gnarled trunks of oak and hawthorn, the generosity of walnut-tree and chestnut". His solitary walks through the Gloucestershire woodland prove an effective motif for a tale of a man searching for a new path. Alfred Hickling, “It’s Just the Beating of My Heart”, in The Guardian, 29^th May 2010 John Stack is a disaffected art dealer who likes a drink. “Drinking is to me what golf is to a golfing pro or skydiving is to a skydiving champion. I want to master it, to hone my sipping, my savouring skills.” Needless to say, he doesn’t think he has a problem; but when his wife and daughter abandon their Cotswold cottage one Christmas, Stack is left to hone his sipping skills and extend his talent for ham-fisted metaphors: “My thoughts go round like a game of swing ball. I send them out into the ether and they come back at me with a lateral wallop but go nowhere.” Redemption arrives in the form of Nicola, an attractive widow who sympathises with his situation “echolalically” (which doesn’t appear in my Oxford Compact, so I can’t help you there, unless he means echoically, which doesn’t make sense.) But given the choice between a single woman and a single malt, Stacks opts for the latter. Aronowitz saves his revelatory denouement for the final page, though the chances are that you’ll have given up long before then. © Richard Aronowitz 2008-2010