Fiction

Back to the world of Big Brother: Julia, by Sandra Newman, reviewed

Sandra Newman’s Juliahas a connoisseur’s nose for body odour. When she gets close to another person or animal, she almost always notices their smell – manly, dusty, dungy, a hint of talcum powder. When she suppresses emotion, she sweats. She sprains her wrist and tears rise ‘of themselves like sweat’. In a pivotal scene, she unblocks a gruesomely overflowing toilet. This abundance of bodily functions feels like a reminder of George Orwell’s original Julia in Nineteen Eighty-Four, whose physical abandon makes her an object of desire and symbol of rebellion. This fantasy is punctured in Julia. Bodies are sensuous but they are also skin-crawlingly horrible. Mutilated wrecks, with teeth and

Everyday life in the Eternal City: Roman Stories, by Jhumpa Lahiri, reviewed

The middle story in this compassionate collection follows disparate folk loosely linked by a set of steps. Among them, there’s the mother who climbs them first thing in the morning, the girl who descends them at two in the afternoon and the screenwriter who lives at the foot of them, and who stays home nearly all day. Together, these men, women and children represent a cross section of society. One comes from ‘a faraway tropical city’; another compares the grubby sight of graffiti to hearing ‘foreigners talking on the street’. Yet, here they are, existing side by side in a Roman neighbourhood, going about their ordinary daily routines. Which is

Ritualistic murder in 1920s America: Cahokia Jazz, by Francis Spufford, reviewed

Writers dealing with that knottiest of problems in fiction – to what extent can they describe cultures and societies not their own without appropriation, an insulting level of ignorance and/or launching a social media storm – are going about it in different ways. The latest novel by Sebastian Faulks is set in the future (where, pleasingly, everyone still needs a coat, phew). Val McDermid has gone the other way and returned to smoky, bottom-pinching years, starting with 1979. Francis Spufford’s solution to writing about race – and race in America at that – is to propose an alternate reality, invent an intensely detailed city to do it in, and extrapolate

Unequivocally Japanese: The Premonition, by Banana Yoshimoto, reviewed

Who are you without memory? This is the question that sits at the heart of The Premonition by Banana Yoshimoto, best known for her 1988 novella Kitchen, which was a smash hit in Japan and adapted for film. The Premonition is a similarly slender work and one that casts a delicate spell. Nineteen-year-old Yayoi has the perfect family – doting parents and a brother she adores – but she feels unsettled, as if she’s forgotten something vital in her past: ‘There, in the midst of such a beautiful evening, my heart must have been full of that premonition.’ Looking for answers, she goes to live with her eccentric aunt Yukino,

Back-room boys: Family Meal, by Bryan Washington, reviewed

There are meals galore in Bryan Washington’s latest novel: those that Cam and his lover Kai cook for one another; those that Cam’s childhood friend TJ cooks for his Thai boyfriend’s cousins; those that TJ’s Vietnamese father Jin cooked for his neighbours every weekend; and those that the now bulimic Cam vomits up after Kai’s murder. There is also sex galore. Each of the novel’s three narrators – Cam, Kai and TJ – engages in ‘random hook-ups’, with Cam in particular using them to dull his pain. Working in a Houston gay bar, he takes customers to a back-room every few hours. His partners include ‘delivery guys and lawyers and

Rising star: The Wolves of Eternity, by Karl Ove Knausgaard, reviewed

The Wolves of Eternity is the second volume in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s trilogy which began with The Morning Star, but is that book’s prequel. The Morning Star examined events in the lives of various narrators at the time of the appearance of a bright new celestial body, bringing uncharacteristic heat and luminosity to Norway. It read like a shiver-inducing drama penned by a combination of Phil Redmond, Irvine Welsh and Stephen King. Part of its genius lay in fleshing out the characters by expressing the ugly thoughts we all keep repressed: irritation with over-familiar strangers; frustration with lovers; the thunderbolt of lust; and boundaries and the ways they are breached.

A potent seam of violence: The Wren, the Wren, by Anne Enright, reviewed

The Irish novelist Anne Enright is now in her sixties. Her deceptively modest new novel, The Wren, The Wren, opens with a long section narrated by Nell, a woman in her early twenties living in contemporary Dublin. Nell scrapes by, ‘writing content non-stop’: travel pieces about places she’s never been to, stories for a wealthy ‘actress/eco-influencer’. Adrift and vulnerable, she falls into an on-off relationship with a man called Felim, who is emotionally cruel and photographs her naked without her permission. With this extended portrait of a much younger woman, Enright quietly establishes her excellence. Laid against similar endeavours by writers of her generation – Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at

A tale of cruelty and imposture: The Fraud, by Zadie Smith, reviewed

‘Is this all that these modern ladies’ novels are to be about? People?’ So asks the bewildered author of Old St Paul’s, The Lancashire Witches, The Tower of London and three dozen other forgotten blockbusters stacked with costumed folderol. In Zadie Smith’s sixth novel, William Harrison Ainsworth disapproves, in 1871, of hiscousin-housekeeper, Eliza Touchet, reading a nameless story of dull village folk with ‘no adventure, no drama, no murder’. It can only be George Eliot’s Middlemarch. The Fraud alights briefly on this quarrel, as it does on many Victorian topics. Yet Smith’s triple-pronged tale of imposture and masquerade, public lies and secret truths, often reverts to fiction’s role either as

Blighted island: Strangers at the Port, by Lauren Aimee Curtis, reviewed

Lauren Aimee Curtis, born in Sydney and recently named one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists, sets her intriguing second book on the Aeolian island of Salina in the late 19th century, when the arrival of phylloxera destroyed the island’s vines and economy, prompting mass emigration. These facts are easy to deduce, especially with the clarification provided in the author’s note, but in the novel itself Curtis names the island ‘S’ and the time becomes ‘that spring, when the men arrived’. She entices us into the mythical realm of not-quite history. Part One is narrated by Giulia, looking back to when she was ten years old and telling her

Cheerful meanderings: Caret, by Adam Mars-Jones, reviewed

The novelistic tube or nozzle through which experience is squeezed in order to be bletted on the page in words, and in turn create the illusion of experience in the reader, is a slender one. Novelists have often perversely focused on the narrowest of lives. Xavier de Maistre wrote an entire travelogue in the 1790s about 42 days spent in his room, while Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s debut novel in 1985 was about a character refusing to leave his bathroom.  Should undertakers ever have suntans? And when does ‘mummy’ become ‘mum’ as a form of address? These spectacular exercises in technique present a parallel to what has always been the case, the

Shades of Kafka: Open Up, by Thomas Morris, reviewed

Thomas Morris has a knack of writing about ordinary things in an unsettling way and unsettling things in an ordinary way. He described his debut collection of ten stories set in Caerphilly, We Don’t Know What We’re Doing, as ‘realism with a kink’. Open Up, a slimmer second offering of five stories, amps up the Kafka. One is narrated by a seahorse, another by a vampire. Morris’s attitude towards his characters remains central: while displaying their darkest secrets, you sense he’s on their side. Here, the narrators are all male. From a young boy to a thirtysomething, they negotiate masculinity’s contradictory demands, accused of being distant, passive and unambitious. Individually,

In search of Jeanne Duval: The Baudelaire Fractal, by Lisa Robertson, reviewed

The shared etymology of the words ‘text’, ‘textile’ and ‘texture’ – from the Latin verb textere, ‘to weave’ – has long been a fertile subject, its thread running through the work of theorists such as Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous, Gilles Deleuze (from whom one of the epigraphs for this book is taken) and others. But this now critical commonplace provides a helpful entry point to the Canadian poet Lisa Robertson’s sometimes evasive first novel The Baudelaire Fractal, a work obsessed with textiles, tailoring, intertextuality and the woven physicality of language. The word ‘novel’ seems only really appropriate in its adjectival sense. It tells the story of Hazel Brown,

Violence in Silicon Valley: The Wolf Hunt, by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, reviewed

‘I believe it’s the writer’s job to force the reader to look where they usually avoid looking,’ Ayelet Gundar-Goshen has said. The Wolf Hunt, her fourth novel translated from the Hebrew by Sondra Silverston, shines a light on racial tensions in America. Israeli-born Lilach and Mikhael Shuster live in Silicon Valley with their 16-year-old son Adam. Like many men in the community, Mikhael works in tech, although rather than developing apps his company makes weapons. Having given up an academic career to follow her husband, Lilach works as a cultural coordinator at a retirement home. ‘Most of the women here coordinated something,’ she observes wryly. When a man with a

At home in the multiverse: Bridge, by Lauren Beukes, reviewed

Lauren Beukes is a writer who puts cerebral propositions into breakneck thrillers: structural misogyny in The Shining Girls; the flipside of patriarchy in Afterland. In Bridge, she investigates the depressive’s favourite hypotheticals – could have, should have, would have, might have. The protagonist is Bridget, whose mother, Jo, has recently died from brain cancer. Jo was a scientist, interested in rather eccentric ideas, and has bequeathed Bridget a problematic legacy. It seems as if Jo had found a way, using harmonics, visual stimuli and an odd, worm-like thing (think fungus or parasite or the nematode in a tequila bottle) to access other realities. Through trial and error, Bridget manages to

Life is a game of cards: Burning Angel and Other Stories, by Lawrence Osborne, reviewed

This compelling and unnerving collection of stories is Lawrence Osborne’s first, coming in the wake of recent critically acclaimed novels – including The Forgiven, adapted into a film – and earlier works of memoir, essays and travelogue. Born in England, currently residing in Bangkok, Osborne has earned comparisons with Graham Greene for his portraits of flawed white characters in foreign settings, and Patricia Highsmith, thanks to the menacing noir atmosphere. These nine stories, written over the past decade, do not disappoint. Osborne removes his protagonists – English or American, on the young side of middle age – from their native environments and transplants them into exotic, perilous locations. Divorced from

A thoroughly modern 18th-century heroine: The Future Future, by Adam Thirlwell, reviewed

Adam Thirlwell’s latest novel begins in revolutionary France and chronicles the travails of its embattled celebrity heroine, Celine, who is being subjected to a campaign of malicious gossip about her sex life. She resolves to cultivate a coterie of influential writers to wrest back control of the narrative – cue earnest meditations on power, misogyny and the ability of the written word to shape reality. Meanwhile, she finds solace in female company, reflecting: In a society made of words and images and circulating and recirculating, all devoted to disinformation, it was very difficult to find any personal safety, and one minuscule form might just be this intense form of friendship

The stepmother’s tale: Take What You Need, by Idra Novey, reviewed

All writers studying their craft should be encouraged to try translation, thinks Idra Novey, the Pennsylvania-born novelist, poet and, si, translator. Working in another language confers the freedom to slip out of their own voices, developing their own tone in the process, she told one interviewer. On the strength of Novey’s third novel, Take What You Need, an adept tale about an estranged stepmother and daughter set in a fictional former steel town in Appalachia, all writers should heed her advice. In spare, affecting prose, she moves effortlessly between her two first-person narrators: sixty something Jean, and Leah, who was ten when Jean walked out on Leah’s dad, leaving a

Bizarre images: I Hear You’re Rich, by Diane Williams, reviewed

‘What am I – I wonder, dear god – now best known for?’ It is a question asked at the end of ‘Gladly!’, one of the American author Diane Williams’s mercurial, light-footed short stories. The narrator in existential crisis has just bumped into a man she ‘once engaged with for years, amid scenes of nearly religious significance’; has found a discarded, brand new pair of ‘canvas All Star high tops’; and witnessed a boy picking up nuts that were ‘meant for squirrels’, and decided that in later life he will be renowned for either ‘gluttony’ or ‘enterprise’. The drama of these occurrences and the self-questioning take place over no more

Two sinister siblings: The Mountain Lion, by Jean Stafford, reviewed

Many of the best literary children – think the creations of Henry James or Elizabeth Bowen – have something creepy about them. These are girls and boys who see through the hypocrisy of adults, and there’s going to be something unnerving about their precocity. Jean Stafford’s Mollie and Ralph took their place in a lineage with James’s Flora and Miles and Bowen’s Henrietta and Leopold when she flung them, bespectacled and prone to nosebleeds, into the world in 1946. Stafford was the first wife of Robert Lowell, and it’s the main thing most people know about her now – unsurprisingly. Lowell was a man who made his mark on his

Games of love and jealousy: Ariane, by Claude Anet, reviewed

‘The world might condemn me, but what’s the world? A gathering of fools and a pile of prejudices.’ Thus, with all the certainty and absolutism of youth, does the 17-year-old Ariane reflect on the prospect of selling herself. There would be an element of épater les bourgeois in this sentiment in almost any age, but to see it so freely expressed at the dawn of the last century comes as something of a surprise. Written in Russia while its French author chronicled the immediate aftermath of the Bolshevik revolution, Claude Anet’s Ariane is a striking, if now largely forgotten, account of a young woman’s pursuit of self-realisation in a world