LITERARY FICTION
THE LYING LIFE OF ADULTS by Elena Ferrante
(Europa €25, 300 pp) WOMEN don’t behave the way they ought in an Elena Ferrante novel which is partly what makes them so thrilling. This one tells the story of Giovanna, a gifted student whose grades start falling when she overhears her adored father unfavourably compare her to his estranged sister Vittoria, a fearsome woman living in Naples whom Giovanna has never met.
Haunted by the comparison, and in the grip of adolescent self-loathing, Giovanna meets her aunt. She is soon caught up in the recriminations and bitterness of her family’s complicated history, even while her own parents’ marriage breaks down on the back of her father’s adultery.
The tentacular plot has the same wayward, jagged impulses of adolescence as the self-sabotaging Giovanna becomes involved with a couple of local boys and develops an obsession with another girl’s religious boyfriend, yet the novel lacks the shimmering coherence of the My Brilliant Friend quartet. Even so, Ferrante confronts female sexual awakening with such an absence of romantic enchantment it leaves you gasping.
MAYFLIES by Andrew O’Hagan
(Faber €17.99, 288 pp) THOSE who came of age in the Eighties to the sounds of New Order and The Smiths will enjoy much in Andrew O’Hagan’s new novel, which begins in 1986 with a group of Scottish teenagers planning a trip to Manchester.
Mrs Thatcher has decimated the industrial heartlands of northern England and a generation of fathers are out of work. But, for their bright, culturally literate sons, who quote from arthouse films as effortlessly as they knock back pints, the future lies in the glory and solidarity to be found in a night at the Hacienda.
Thirty years on, narrator James, who now has a writerly life in London eerily similar to that of O’Hagan, is knocked sideways when his best friend and orchestrator of that weekend of Manchester mayhem calls to say he has cancer.
O’Hagan crunches clumsily through the gears in this uneven novel which, while containing brilliant passages on youth and mortality, never escapes the selfconsciousness of nostalgia.
RED PILL by Hari Kunzru
(Simon and Schuster €17.99, 304 pp) ALL sorts of novels are starting to emerge from the Trump presidency. This latest one by the bestselling author of White Tears, is among the most discomforting of them.
Its unnamed narrator has swapped Brooklyn domesticity with his wife and young daughter for a three-month writing retreat ominously sited at Wannsee near Berlin where, in 1942, the Nazis planned the Final Solution.
Yet, frustrated by the centre’s communal ethos, and increasingly convinced those who run it are monitoring his every move, he finds himself unable to write, bingewatching an extremely violent cop TV series each night, instead.
Matters take a lurch into the peculiar when, at a party, he encounters the TV show’s writer, an alt-Right fantasist and dark web enthusiast who believes nihilistic violence is the only way for society to begin again. Soon our narrator is in the grip of a paranoid breakdown.
Germany’s dark history of fascism and Stasi surveillance is somewhat too easy an historical mirror for our present times, but this unstable hallucination of a novel is bleakly persuasive on modern liberal complacency sleepwalking into horror.