Fiction
The female gaze
The Wren, The Wren
Anne Enright
The Wren, The Wren Anne Enright
The female gaze
Anne Enright is one of our acutest chroniclers of relational complexity. In her eighth novel, she again gives us a portrait of a uniquely unhappy family. Intimate and ambiguous, refusing to settle anywhere for long, The Wren, The Wren is told in three voices. There’s middle-aged Carmel, recalling her childhood on the outskirts of Dublin with her ailing mother, resentful older sister and womanising father. There’s Carmel’s free-spirited daughter Nell, who is trying to escape the intensity of their bond but only succeeds in swapping it for a far riskier one with an abusive lover; and finally, there is Carmel’s father himself, the poet Phil McDaragh, garrulous, seductive, pathologically self-regarding; the fount and origin of most of this dysfunction.
In Enright’s novels violence is never heroic, though it’s often clarifying. Again and again, the real action is between women. As adults, Carmel and her sister Imelda act out the antagonism bred by years of fighting for their parents’ love by slamming each other around their childhood home: “A little hugff of air came out of Imelda as she hit the wall and Carmel shifted into a brighter place … It was as though her skull were filled with light.” The Wren, The Wren is ruthless, raw stuff, both less calculated and more illuminating than anything Phil McDaragh could have written.
Elizabeth Lowry
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Art
Daring to be different
Art Monsters
Lauren Elkin
Art Monsters Lauren Elkin
Daring to be different
Who gets to be a monster? Is the term reserved for enemies or can it be applied to heroes too? Lauren Elkin’s work of radical feminist criticism asks us to meet her art monsters, who are all women, and to see their monstrosity as central to their being and their art.
She defines an art monster as someone “reaching after the truth of her own body”, someone who “takes for granted that the experiences of female embodiment are relevant to all humankind”, someone who “alerts us to what is outside of language”. Her book is written in a series of short and long snippets, separated by slashes. Some of them are critical engagements with works of art, others are fragments of memoir about existing in a female body or the process of writing the book itself; still others are more general art historical criticism or reflection. The immediacy of it all carries the reader along with Elkin as she thinks through her questions and disrupts traditional expectations of how “serious” theory should be written.
Art Monsters joins a larger conversation about monstrousness and art. In Claire Dederer’s recent Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, the monsters in question are mostly men who committed various forms of violence, abuse and discrimination. She asks how (and if) we can appreciate their work in spite of their monstrosity. Elkin’s use of the word is very different, but she grapples with similar questions about what we consider acceptable behaviour for artists and how that is connected to gender and power. Instead of separating the art from the artist, she fuses the two together completely, provoking new, deeper questions about how feminism can and must evolve to engage with those who do things differently – the monsters in our midst.
Eliza Goodpasture
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Fiction
Life as a survivor
Study for Obedience
Sarah Bernstein
Study for Obedience Sarah Bernstein
Life as a survivor
In the years since #MeToo, an outpouring of fiction by writers such as Emma Cline, Sophie Mackintosh and Rachel Yoder has grappled with what it means to be a victim, and what it takes to be an abuser. Montreal-born, Scottish-based author Sarah Bernstein’s Booker-shortlisted novel, Study for Obedience, spins a carefully woven web of culpability and criminality – of which gender is one fine thread – in answering its central question: if attacks on minority groups are unrelenting, in what ways do those groups internalise blame?
The narrator’s encounters with modern-day antisemitism are captured acutely and absurdly
“I knew they were right to hold me responsible,” professes Bernstein’s unnamed narrator at the outset. “They” are the native residents of an unspecified remote northern country where her entrepreneurial elder brother lives in a lavish, former gentry-owned manor house. After his marriage breaks down, she drops everything and travels to be at his beck and call. The crime of which she stands accused is begetting a series of local environmental catastrophes on her arrival: a dog’s “phantom pregnancy”; a depressive sow crushing her piglets; and a herd of crazed cattle.
As in her first novel, The Coming Bad Days, Bernstein paints from a palette of dread, her fickle narrator imagining that the land itself is trying to “expel” her. Little actually happens, but, mirroring the protagonist’s daily ramblings through the woods, the novel is made up of philosophical, sometimes rhapsodic meanderings logged in meticulous, measured prose. Bernstein was named one of Granta’s best young British novelists of 2023, and it’s little wonder. This masterly follow-up to her debut acts as a meditation on survival, the dangers of absorbing the narratives of the powerful, and a warning that the self-blame of the oppressed often comes back to bite.
Miriam Balanescu
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Fiction
Lyrical tale of a family accused
Ordinary Human Failings
Megan Nolan
Ordinary Human Failings Megan Nolan
Lyrical tale of a family accused
Ordinary Human Failings is a considerably more interesting book than it claims to be. It’s pitched as a procedural thriller of sorts – an unsolved murder, the cops closing in, an ambitious journalist snooping around. While there may be a depressing commercial logic to this framing, it does the novel scant justice; those plot elements amount to little more than a deftly handled framing device. Beyond lies a subtle, accomplished and lyrical study of familial and intergenerational despair, a quiet book about quiet lives. And it also happens to be an excellent novel: politically astute, furious and compassionate. It’s considerably better than Nolan’s first novel, the acclaimed Acts of Desperation – worth stating, given our neophilic literary culture’s obsession with debuts and novelty.
Set mostly in the early 1990s, it tells the story of the Greens, a family of Irish immigrants who have moved to London in the hope of escaping the social stigma of daughter Carmel’s teenage pregnancy and her brother Ritchie’s escalating alcoholism. Judged reclusive and odd by their new neighbours, the Greens are easy scapegoats when tragedy visits their estate. As we gradually learn more about the psychological and structural forces that have shaped the family, a picture emerges of lives foreclosed; of youthful audacity hardening into resignation and resentment, fresh starts rendered heavy by old habit, sadnesses handed from parent to child like cursed heirlooms.
Nolan describes the Greens as having “ordinary human failings, tragedies too routine to be of note”. But in this deeply tender book, she not only notes those tragedies, she also bears witness to them. To do so is an act of compassion. To do so with such grace is a genuine achievement.
Keiran Goddard
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Fiction
Who is this mysterious artist?
Biography of X
Catherine Lacey
Biography of X Catherine Lacey
Who is this mysterious artist?
Celebrated for her novels, her art installations and her musical collaborations with David Bowie, Tom Waits and Tony Visconti, the artist known as X was, until her death in 1996, one of the more enigmatic cultural figures of the 20th century. She always refused to confirm her place or date of birth, and after she took the pseudonym “X” in 1982, it was never clear which if any of her previous identities – Dorothy Eagle, Clyde Hill, Caroline Walker, Bee Converse – corresponded to her actual name. This is a biography drawing on X’s archives and a range of interviews with the people closest to her, joining the dots about her background and exploring her difficult relationship with contemporary America. And it is, like X herself, entirely a work of fiction.
There is so much that’s impressive about this book. It makes you think afresh about America and American history. It roves over the muddy trenches of identity politics while saying things that are original and not parti pris. At its centre, X is a charismatic, tantalising figure who takes aim at all orthodoxies. It’s hard to locate influences, but one mention of the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges made me think of his story Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius. In this strange tale, objects from a fictional world penetrate our world and transform it. A lovingly made facsimile of a nonfiction book, Biography of X resembles a Tlönian artefact from a parallel reality. Though it may not change the world, it will leave the reader altered.
Marcel Theroux
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Biography
The story of a showman
Mr B
Jennifer Homans
Mr B Jennifer Homans
The story of a showman
The dancer and choreographer George Balanchine – known to his dancers as “Mr B” – saw himself as “a musician and theatre man”, a showman who had worked in opera houses and touring troupes, from the Russian czar’s Mariinsky Theater of his youth to the Paris Opera, Broadway theatres, Hollywood movies, and his own New York City Ballet, founded in 1948, which had more than a hundred dancers at his death in 1983.
He described himself as “a cloud in trousers” (after Mayakovsky’s poem) and dancers often referred to him as “the breath”, meaning spirit. For Balanchine was split between physicality (trousers) and spirit: he was sensual, a lover of fine wine and beautiful women, especially his young dancers, whom he nurtured (“he gathered and shaped them, making his own paints and pigments from their flesh and blood”) and with whom he often fell in love. According to Balanchine, “everything a man does, he does for his ideal woman.” But there was also a profound inwardness to Balanchine that made him strangely detached from the world, “like an angel who knows everything but feels nothing”.
Georgi Balanchivadze was born in St Petersburg in 1904. He was accepted into the Imperial Theater School at the age of 9. The ballet teachers liked his “slight physique, straight posture and calm exterior”. His older sister was rejected the same day. As a child, he experienced cold and starvation in revolutionary Russia: “the fear of gnawing hunger and acrid smell of dead bodies piled in the streets in those early years never really left him”. But as Jennifer Homans points out in her Baillie Gifford prize shortlisted book, the revolution that ruined his childhood also provided the source of his genius.
He fled Russia in 1924, going first to Weimar Germany (“he had a knack for swallowing dying civilizations whole and getting out”), then Paris, where he worked with Sergei Diaghilev and the Ballet Russe. In 1933, he went to America where he created “a music-filled monument to faith and unreason, to body and beauty. It was his own counterrevolutionary world of the spirit.” During the Cuban Missile Crisis, Balanchine returned to the Soviet Union with the New York City Ballet. When a prominent Moscow critic told Balanchine he had no soul, “he sharply retorted that since Soviet critics didn’t believe in God, they couldn’t know about the soul”.
Homans trained at Balanchine’s New York ballet school, where she watched him rehearse and took classes with him. She has also performed in his ballets and attended Balanchine’s funeral at New York’s Russian Orthodox church. She spent a decade writing this magisterial biography, an experience she describes as “the greatest adventure and challenge of my professional life”.
It is a suitably weighty tome (more than 700 pages), but it is brilliantly crafted and a pleasure to read. Indeed, her accounts of his “beautiful, glamorous, glorious, strange, outrageous, at times grotesque” dances are both illuminating and deeply moving. This remarkable study takes us into the mind of one of the great creative forces of the 20th century and in Homan’s hands his life-story becomes a heartfelt celebration of the power of modern dance.
PD Smith
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Memoir
Till death do us part
The Archaeology of Loss
Sarah Tarlow
The Archaeology of Loss Sarah Tarlow
Till death do us part
Sarah Tarlow built her academic career as an archaeologist researching grief and mourning. Now she has written her own memoir of care, followed by the remaking of the relationship between the survivor and the deceased.
In 2013, Mark, Tarlow’s partner of 15 years and the father of her three children, developed the first symptoms of a degenerative disease that was never fully diagnosed. In May 2016, while Tarlow and her children were out on a rare family visit, Mark took a fatal overdose of a drug he had bought online and kept hidden until he judged he’d lost enough to be sure about ending his life while still being able to do it. It was not, Tarlow insists, an irrational decision. Mark was not mentally ill: “Being dead is sometimes better than being alive.”
She played no part in his death, and the arrangements he made were plainly intended to leave no doubt as to her ignorance. All the same, she cannot regret his passing – because Mark was in terrible and worsening pain, had lost his capacity to do anything he found pleasant or meaningful, and expected only further deterioration.
For Tarlow, the labour of care had been overwhelming. Mark’s cognitive impairments had made him hostile and aggressive towards the children and their friends as well as his partner. There were few visitors or outings and no respite. The NHS could keep Mark alive and supply Tarlow with hoists and rails so she could move him around their Victorian house, but there were no sociocultural resources: “We are very bad at supplying the community, the human contact, that would compensate for the things our science and technology cannot do.”
Tarlow is frank about her resentment and despair, and also about her guilt over her resentment and despair. She is clear-sighted about what the rest of us have invested in ignoring carers’ misery – because if we recognised that many people do not find it worthwhile to give up their careers and friendships and health to look after relatives, we would see that “as a society, we build our ability to function on a foundation of unhappiness”.
This book will be divisive because ambivalence in caring for the dying is as much of a taboo as ambivalence in caring for babies used to be. “I wish the character of me was a bit nicer,” Tarlow writes, and one sees why. But the narrator has the scholar’s inability to soften or sweeten what she knows, which is that we don’t always love the dying and the dead, and that rage and mixed feelings are at least as interesting as sorrow. Look elsewhere for cheeriness; the pleasures offered here are those of intelligence and complexity in the hard times that will come to many of us.
Sarah Moss
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Fiction
Dancing in Peckham
Small Worlds
Caleb Azumah Nelson
Small Worlds Caleb Azumah Nelson
Dancing in Peckham
Peckham, a district of south-east London formerly associated with substandard housing, tabloid reports of criminality and overpolicing, has been in the throes of a remarkable transformation over the last decade. Not only has it witnessed gentrification but, as seen in the recent film Rye Lane and in Caleb Azumah Nelson’s novel Small Worlds, it is increasingly a site of inspiration for creative artists.
Small Worlds, the follow-up to Nelson’s multi-award-winning debut Open Water, focuses on Stephen, a teenage second-generation migrant of Ghanaian parents, Eric and Joy. Theirs is an involved and loving family. Stephen’s closeness to his mother is especially apparent in their tender biweekly visits to the Peckhamplex cinema.
Small Worlds is determinedly not another rehearsal of the kind of voyeuristic tabloid interest in Black people’s lives marked by violence and social deprivation; rather, it’s a love story. At least it sets out that way. Some novels announce their intention from the first page. Here the burgeoning romance between Stephen and his fellow sixth former, Del, moves glacially from a beginning that risks appearing banal to an affecting meditation on the migrant experience.
Though a perceptive narrator, Stephen is frustrated by his own inarticulacy. Del is sassy and beautiful. “I want to say this to her,” he admits, “but outside of song and film, I’ve never heard this spoken.” It might help Stephen if he was more familiar with his parents’ mother tongue, but he informs us: “Mum always says my Ga has come home in a suitcase, like I’m a visitor in my own language.”
Colin Grant
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Fiction
Belfast struggles
Close to Home
Michael Magee
Close to Home Michael Magee
Belfast struggles
Novels about precarity are a precarious business. Far too many debuts of recent years claim to capture what it is like to be a young person in this age of intersecting economic and social crises, when in reality they focus on a set of experiences that are much narrower, much more class-specific and much more temporary. If you were being uncharitable, you could boil many such books down to “recent arts graduate feels emotionally, financially and erotically unsatisfied and works in the service industry while they figure their life out”. This sense of ennui simply isn’t a luxury that is available to many who are living at the sharp end, where the parlous state of things feels both systemic and permanent.
Close to Home, the taut and impressive debut by Michael Magee, has none of these limitations and, as a result, feels like that rarest of things: a genuinely necessary book. The novel depicts a period of readjustment for Sean, a reflective, slightly sullen man in his 20s who has returned to Belfast after university. He finds exactly what he left; a network of lives being shaped and misshaped by poverty, addiction, casual violence and trauma. Sean spends his days drinking and sniffing, wrestling with his masculinity, falling in and out of employment and vaguely hoping that a different way of living might eventually present itself. The structural forces that underpin his sense of stasis are ever-present and stifling; a collapsing economy, rampant landlordism and the long, complex shadow that continues to be cast by the Troubles.
Keiran Goddard
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Memoir
Second life
Is This OK?
Harriet Gibsone
Is This OK? Harriet Gibsone
Second life
Harriet the Spy is a 1964 childrens’ book about a little girl who snoops relentlessly on her neighbours. Harriet Gibsone did the same thing when she was young. Now in her late 30s, she still shares with the fictional Harriet a powerful imagination and endless fascination with others. Harriet the Spy was banned in a number of American schools; apparently morally upright people didn’t approve of watchful girls trying to figure out the world on their own terms. I love these characters, nurturing as they do some feeling of control in a world where they do not have any.
Is This OK? is a memoir, full of finely told stories that were once secrets existing only in the writer’s mind; addictions, obsessions, weirdnesses. Gibsone came of age at the same time as the internet, her own development shaped by its strange currents. She chooses episodes from her life and makes some of them funny – laugh-out-loud-on-the-train funny; some of them are frightening and sad. Many illuminate a bigger truth about living at this peculiar time and in the grey area between the online and offline worlds.
This is a memoir that swings between silliness and profundity; Gibsone is a writer taking herself seriously but having fun while doing it. Is This OK? is a book to hold on to and one to share, a warning and a map created by a watchful girl, telling others what may lie ahead.
Maeve Higgins
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History
The horrific reality of nuclear war
Attack Warning Red!
Julie McDowall
Attack Warning Red! Julie McDowall
The horrific reality of nuclear war
Julie McDowall first became aware of the threat of nuclear war in September 1984, when she was just three years old. She should have been in bed, but instead she watched Threads on TV with her father. Set in Sheffield, Mick Jackson’s shocking drama is, says McDowall, “perhaps the most powerful nuclear war film ever made”. She was “transfixed by the nightmare on the screen. The experience scarred me for life.”
As anxieties about war with Russia are once again making headlines, McDowall’s book is certainly timely. She takes us back to the early days of the Cold War in the 1950s, to the testing of the H-bombs or “Horror-bombs” as the British press termed them and the realisation that a war fought with such weapons would not just obliterate a few cities, as happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, but would mean the end of civilization itself.
McDowall explains how in the following years British governments attempted to think the unthinkable and prepare for war: from the ladies of the Women’s Royal Voluntary Service practising setting up field kitchens and how to fortify homes against nuclear bombs (“they had well-meant plans to provide post-apocalyptic blankets, books and jigsaws”), to civil servants anticipating the use of forced labour to clear corpses from city streets. Today their plans seem hopelessly inadequate. As she says, “the good old Blitz Spirit was summoned again and again”.
The population would have had just four minutes warning before the bombs fell. All TV channels would play the same message: “Here is an emergency announcement. An air attack is approaching this country. Go to shelter or take cover immediately.” After this, sirens would wail (“the streets of Britain would be shrieking”), private phone lines would be disconnected, and motorways would by blocked by the police. There was no escape from nuclear war. As the top-secret Strath Report informed the government in the 1950s, this was a new era of “total war”, when “the entire nation would be in the front line”.
In the hills above Largs, near the Firth of Clyde, McDowall visits Royal Observer Corps 23 Post Skelmore. It was one of many such bunkers spread across Britain, from where observers would report on explosions and radioactive fallout during a nuclear war: “with the weak light, low ceiling and stacks of clutter, the thought of being confined here while a nuclear war roared above is almost unbearable.”
From how to create a fallout bunker in your house using doors and boxes of earth or even books, to what to do with the bodies of family members (label them, wrap with plastic or blankets and bury in the garden if not collected within five days), McDowall’s excellent book is a chilling reminder of the horrific reality of nuclear war.
PD Smith
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