The Exhibitionist by Charlotte Mendelson
Mantle £16.99 pp322
Charlotte Mendelson’s family dramas — particularly the sharply funny Daughters of Jerusalem (2003) — are almost Shakespearean in their twists and revelations. Her latest is no exception, and the judges of this year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction agree: they placed it on their longlist before it hit the shelves.
The novel centres around the opening night of Ray Hanrahan’s new art exhibition. Ray is a sensitive patriarch, but manipulative too, forcing his (more talented) artist wife, Lucia, to smother her own ambitions. He’s so horrible that I initially worried he was unrealistic, a pantomime villain, but think about it — haven’t we all met a Ray at some point?
Poor Lucia, meanwhile, has been turning down career opportunities for years, living in fear that Ray will find out about the critical interest in her work. Combine that with her recent breast cancer (an opportunity for Ray to sleep around) and she’s a classic victim. Yet she has a secret — a lesbian love affair that Ray is too narcissistic to notice.
Their children are inevitably scarred. Patrick is suffering from mental illness and constantly bullied by Ray. Leah has devoted her life to her father, forgoing romance in pursuit of paternal affection. Jess, the youngest, has returned from Edinburgh for the show with her annoying boyfriend, Martyn, in tow and a secret lodged deep in her coat pocket.
Sparks fly, of course, making for excruciating reading — some secrets come out; others don’t. With an electrifying narrative full of life’s messiness, this is a real contender for the Women’s Prize. Laura Hackett
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Exactly What You Mean by Ben Hinshaw
Viking £14.99 pp224
“You’re on LinkedIn, aren’t you?” someone asks a colleague at a leaving party in one of the stories in Ben Hinshaw’s remarkable first book. Elsewhere, Friends Reunited is mentioned. As Exactly What You Mean unfolds, it becomes increasingly apparent that interconnection pervades it.
The 11 stories it contains vary between first and third-person narration. The tone shifts between suave comedy and raw pain. There are jumps back and forth in time. Settings range from Hinshaw’s native Guernsey (whose insularity plays a significant role throughout) to the vineyards of Bordeaux, scruffy backpacker quarters in Greece, a garish Californian restaurant-cum-casino, a deluxe hotel in Zanzibar, and a “Ghost Walks” tour of London that takes in mouldering graveyards and a plague pit in Green Park. Characters are seen from multiple angles — sometimes centrally, sometimes on the margins of someone else’s drama — and at different stages of their lives. Gradually, it all meshes into an intricate cat’s cradle of relationships and repercussions.
Linking motifs — especially pictures by a photojournalist who finally appears in the last story — recur. So do unlucky accidents: a trampoline mishap that ruins a knee, a dangerously toxic sting from a sea creature in the Indian ocean, a torn ligament. But what most connects Hinshaw’s stories is, paradoxically, their focus on separation. Friendships diverge, marriages split, lovers fail to unite, betrayals occur and infidelities fester (in a sardonic revenge tale, the wife of an unfaithful husband turns participation in the London Marathon into a lethal weapon).
Virtuosity of technique accompanies keenness of insight and depth of characterisation. Watching Gloria, a fortysomething waitress, sexily bantering with her “regs” at the five-dollar buffet in a gambling joint near Sacramento, the narrator of one piece contemptuously dismisses her as “all cleavage and lip gloss”. But, later, the book’s standout story, Brazil and Back, reveals that Gloria is a heroine.
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Behind her sassy breeziness, there is stoicism and bravery. When not serving tables, she is resourcefully struggling to help her drug-addicted son, returned from military service in Afghanistan with a bullet-wrecked hip, shattered nerves and a mind teetering on psychotic breakdown. Wonderfully combining subtlety of psychological and emotional perception with sharp-eyed social observation, the story, told in Gloria’s own resolutely jaunty voice, is a miniature masterpiece of ventriloquism and empathy.
What can be achieved by ingeniously interlocking stories has been triumphantly displayed by works such as Tim Winton’s multi-angled panorama of a coastal town in Western Australia, The Turning (2004), and Jennifer Egan’s much-acclaimed tour de force, A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010). Hinshaw’s impressively accomplished debut puts him in their company. Peter Kemp
