Every once in a while comes a novel that generates its own success, simply by being loved. Louisa Young’s My Dear I Wanted to Tell You (HarperCollins, £12.99, £11.69) inspires the kind of devotion among its readers not seen since David Nicholls’ One Day. On the surface, it looks like a fairly standard First World War tale of chaps in the trenches and the girls who keep the home fires burning, but Young tells it beautifully, and her characters are unforgettable — especially young Riley Purefoy, a working-class Londoner whose faun-like prettiness is his entry into the world of Edwardian art. Think of A. S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book without the lectures, and with tons more schmaltz; divine.
There are a few lectures in Geraldine Brooks’ Caleb’s Crossing (Fourth Estate, £16.99, £15.29) — historical novels of the serious sort tend to wear their research a little ostentatiously — but this is forgivable when the details are so fascinating. The setting is the tiny island of Great Harbor (now Martha’s Vineyard) in the 1660s, and the story’s driving force is the love affair between Bethia, a rebellious minister’s daughter, and a boy from the local Wampanoag tribe. Later known as Caleb, he becomes the first Native American to graduate from Harvard. He really existed, but Brooks has dressed the bare facts in moving and imaginative storytelling.
Annalena McAfee’s The Spoiler (Harvill Secker, £12.99, £11.69) is a cutting, hilarious portrait of British print journalism, epitomised by two contrasting women. It is early 1997, and the technological revolution has let all sorts of people into what was once the macho boys’ club of Fleet Street. Tamara Sim — 27, airheaded, ambitious — has landed an interview with Honor Tait, an old-school woman journalist of the Martha Gellhorn type. She’s a bitter old gorgon, but missy’s not as dumb as she looks; an entirely human story that brilliantly re-creates and analyses the recent past.
Nobody does a finer old gorgon than Alan Bennett. Mrs Forbes, anti-heroine of The Shielding of Mrs Forbes — one of the two longish short stories that make up Bennett’s Smut (Faber/Profile, £12, £10) — is a true collector’s item: a disappointed woman, whose husband and son are shielding her from more disappointment. In The Greening of Mrs Donaldson, a timid middle-aged widow feigns illnesses for the benefit of medical students and accepts a very unorthodox payment from her lodgers. Both stories are sublimely funny.
When David Foster Wallace (Infinite Jest, etc) committed suicide in 2008, he left The Pale King (Hamish Hamilton, £20, £17.50), a dense sprawl of an unfinished novel. His editor, Michael Pietsch, has done a very good job of taming the material into a book that can stand as a fitting memorial. “An arrow of starlings fired from the windbreak’s thatch. The glitter of dew that stays where it is and gleams all day.” His theme is boredom. At the IRS Regional Examination Centre in Peoria, the work is so tedious that new workers are trained in boredom survival. Nobody else could make the curse of modern life this interesting.
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The Humbling (Vintage, £7.99, £7.59) is one of the mighty Philip Roth’s shorter broadsides; a grimly funny commentary on the universal drama of ageing. Simon Axler was once one of the leading actors of the American stage. In his sixties, his talent has deserted him. “All that worked to make him himself now worked to make him look like a lunatic.” For an actor, this loss of personal definition, once his stock-in-trade, is particularly cruel. Renaissance seems possible when Pegeen, the gay daughter of his oldest friends, comes back into his life, but it’s all, like everything else, a performance. Not Roth’s greatest, but still terrific.
Howard Jacobson is often called the English Roth, probably because both have brilliantly addressed their own Jewishness. Jacobson, however, is much funnier, and far less pompous. The Finkler Question (Bloomsbury, £7.99, £7.59), winner of the 2010 Man Booker Prize, explores the mystery of being Jewish through the eyes of an outsider. Julian Treslove is a BBC radio producer who has never quite lost touch with Sam Finkler, his old Jewish schoolfriend. Finkler is now a popular philosopher and media personality, and Julian is quick to assume that he’s successful — and still happily married — because he’s Jewish. This is a wonderful, dark-toned comedy of philo-semitism, anti-semitism’s kinder but equally deluded brother.
Rose Tremain’s thrilling, evocative Trespass (Vintage, £7.99, £7.59) is set in an obscure valley in Southern France. The Mas Lunel is a farmhouse owned by an alcoholic misanthrope, Aramon Lunel. His sister, Audrun, exiled to a hideous bungalow at the edge of the land, watches the big house and plots revenge. Into this rather primitive world steps Anthony Verey, an antiquarian book dealer from London, and all manner of ugliness is suddenly laid bare. To be read slowly; Tremain’s writing is too exquisite to hurry.
Great House (Penguin, £8.99, £8.54) by Nicole Krauss, was shortlisted for this year’s Orange Prize (as was her last, The History of Love) and it dramatises the emotions that swirl around a piece of furniture — a desk, reputedly once used by Lorca. In New York in 1972, a young woman spends one night with a Chilean poet and agrees to look after his desk. Years later, his daughter appears to claim it. Krauss writes about love with beautiful sensitivity.
The youthful appearance of 25-year-old Téa Obreht, whose first novel The Tiger’s Wife (click here to read an interview with the author) won the 2011 Orange Prize, gives no clue to the wisdom and invention of her writing (Orion, £12.99, £9.99). Natalia is a young doctor who travels around the Balkans in the aftermath of war, giving vital healthcare to children in orphanages. On one such journey she hears of the death of her adored grandfather, in puzzling circumstances, and finds a clue to the mystery in an old copy of The Jungle Book. It’s a stunning tale with the mythic quality of a fairy story, all the more remarkable because English is Obreht’s second language.
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Philip Pullman is well known for his dislike of organised religion; could this novel signify the first twitch upon the thread? The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ (Canongate, £7.99, £7.59) retells the story of the Gospels with a considerable difference — his Mary gives birth to twins, Jesus and Christ. Jesus is a decent guy, but his evil twin cares more about power.
This conceit enables Pullman to criticise the institution of the Church, while keeping a surprising amount of respect for its founder. Rather tub-thumping, but incredibly entertaining.
Retro read: Kill Your Darlings by Terence Blacker
Gregory Keays is a one-hit novelist — now reduced to teaching creative writing — who, after a taste of literary success, can’t seem to repeat the feat. His wife is a design guru whose earning power is destroying their sex life, and he can’t get more than hostile grunts out of his teenage son. Then one of his students produces a novel of real brilliance. How far will Gregory go, how low will he sink, to save his career? This must be the funniest book yet about writers and writing — and the blackest.
Published by Phoenix
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Latest must-reads
Caribou Island by David Vann Viking, £8.99, £8.54
At Last by Edward St Aubyn Picador, £16.99, £15.29
State of Wonder by Ann Patchett Bloomsbury, £12.99, £11.69
The Stranger’s Child by Alan Hollinghurst Picador, £20, £18
A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan Corsair, £14.99, £13.49
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