A therapeutic satire of our times

FREE ASSOCIATION Steven Boykey Sidley Loot.co.za (R199) Picador Africa

REVIEWER: JENNIFER CROCKER

MAX Lurie is a podcaster. We meet him in Free Association as he is marking his first anniversary of podcasting.

Max is ruminating over the past year and what it is that he seems to want to do with his podcasts (apart from be downloaded by a lot of people and draw sponsors to his show).

Although perhaps that isn’t what Max really wants – perhaps it’s more what his somewhat enigmatic producer, Bongani Maposa, wants.

Max talks mostly about himself in his podcasts, about his girlfriend who he doesn’t really have, and about his feelings about his father who is suffering from Alzheimer’s.

Or as he says, “My life and its frequent disappointments, your lives, and the lives of others.

“Anything that gets my back up. Random observations.

“Anything that piques my interest.”

Steven Boykey Sidley has constructed his novel by juxtaposing Max’s podcasts with a compelling narrative of his own life as it unfolds day by day.

Both make for taught narrative where every word counts.

The characters that make up Free Association are a delight.

Bongani is a South African immigrant. Max has met him at a party and Bongani has basically employed himself to produce Max’s podcast.

The two men get on well, but there is a distance between them, one that signifies one of the novel’s themes, which is immigration or diaspora.

But Bongani is not a caricature of what we might be tempted to imagine an African immigrant in the US to be – he’s his own man and he confounds Max’s occasional efforts to put him in a box.

His older sister Delphine is a straight-up-and-down character, and Sidley’s portrayal of her is so realistic that it often feels as though she has crept into your home and is sitting next to you, as do the other characters.

She’s the reason for Max’s flights of fancy.

She has a steady and unglamorous job and is married to Mort, an academic who likes to mix it up with mind-altering drugs. In fact it’s only through these drugs that Max and Mort form a friendship.

Of course, podcasts lead to rumination and a wonderfully satirical examination of modern life as we know it.

Max is drawn to look for material in dark places at times, especially when his own life seems rather mundane.

Thus his journey into the dark web where he finds a plethora of services, illegal goods, and just downright nasty stuff.

The question is, how will he respond to this?

Mirroring the satire and disconnect between the world of ether and the day-to-day lives of the characters is a large and satisfying part of this challenging novel.

Because Max is constantly drawn back to reality, and then free to write his own version of it for his podcast; one where he can do things that he doesn’t do in real life.

It’s also a book about facing death, and here Sidley deals with his subject matter in a deeply moving and ever-so hilarious way.

What if you found that the person who you thought gave you your most valuable lesson in life (just one lesson, mind you) was not quite the person you thought they were?

And what if when you found out you had eulogised them as the person they weren’t already?

What if the world is a chimera with few answers, or very few that can be pinned down?

In fact, do facts matter at all in the brave new world we inhabit, where we can buy a gun online, and create people in our lives who don’t exist?

There is one particular character who has relatively few words in Free Association.

He lives in the alley outside Max’s apartment and his name is Jake.

He suffers from mental illness and Max uses his story in his podcast, but to protect him he says that he is a novelist – something that enrages Jake, because as a person living with a mental disease, what he was before he hit the streets is what defines him.

His anger at what he sees as Max’s betrayal is extreme.

The nuances of this part of the story are beautifully finessed. Sidley has created a character who is aware of his predicament and has agency over his life, even though from the outside it appears that he does not.

There is some truly brilliant writing in the scene where Jake appears at Max’s first dinner party.

The scene is a sublime one, the outcome totally surprising.

Through switching between a virtual world and an all-tooreal world, Sidley hands us a satirical tale of our times that is truly one of the finest books I have read for a long while.

He has a depth and a grace of writing that takes what could be ludicrous and makes it lyrical.

For instance, Max rents office space from a former girlfriend who is massively successful doing something in the cyber world, she’s changed her name to Pixel and doesn’t answer to her old name, but she is also one of the most wonderfully real people in the book.

This book is pure therapy on one level (oh, by the way, Max used to be a therapist), and on another level it is a chance to enjoy a skilfully crafted novel.

Sophisticated, funny and sad, it will lure you into viewing the world in a slightly different way.

It’s also about facing death, in a deeply moving and ever-so hilarious way