Tough job trying to live the dream
Owens skewers to hilarious effect in her much-hyped debut novel.
In stark contrast to Claire, her boyfriend Luke is a trainee brain surgeon. But Claire has no qualms about phoning him at work when he’s scrubbing up for surgery to discuss a stray buddleia or ask whether he thinks her déjà vu is a symptom of a brain tumour.
Even saintly Luke starts to lose patience when Claire can’t manage to cash a cheque or post a parcel for him: “‘I’m just trying to understand what it is you do all day.’ Luke has a knuckle in one of his eyes.”
But it is difficult for Claire to define what she does all day. She enters competitions. She visits the gym to cancel her contract only to emerge signed up to three sessions with a personal trainer.
She attempts to make peace with her mother who has avoided Claire since her grandfather’s funeral when she let slip that he used to expose himself to her. Even her gran,
Cold comfort in a world of suspended animation
arranging for her body to be frozen until such times as she can be cured. Jeffrey has no problem with this: what disturbs him is his father Ross’s desire to join her, even though he is still healthy.
This service is offered by an institute known as The Convergence, a facility at an obscure site somewhere near Kazakhstan which is funded by billionaire Ross, hidden underground and carefully designed to avoid disturbance from the outside world.
Lockhart’s father assures him the facility is manned by the brightest “social theorists, biologists, futurists, geneticists, climatologists, neuroscientists, psychologists and ethicists”, trying to work out the philosophical and logistical questions that these frozen individuals might confront upon 1966 AND ALL THAT! THE 50TH ANNIVERSARY
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who thinks Google can tell her whether to have soup or sausages for dinner, is busier than Claire. Will our exasperating anti-heroine ever get her act together?
What makes Not Working stand out is Owens’ gift for observation and she captures modern life with such pinpoint accuracy that it echoes the Bridget Jones’s Diary phenomenon of the 1990s.
It’s not easy being young these days, with secure jobs and housing spiralling out of reach, and it’s arguably brave of Claire to step back from the rat race to get her life on the right course, even if she is incredibly privileged to have the choice. But of course there is no right course and Claire emerges from her life experiment a little older and a lot wiser. Well, a bit wiser.
Not Working establishes Owens as a funny, perceptive and entertaining new writer. reawakening. There are even philologists developing a new language to cope with changes they can’t yet envision. Ross is desperate for his son to appreciate his work but Jeffrey struggles to comprehend what is at stake.
The closest Zero K comes to science fiction is a section in which Artis is outside time in a state of frozen animation and trying to cling on to thoughts and language as a way of preserving her identity.
This creepy section echoes Jeffrey’s obsessive reading of the dictionary, trying to use etymology to understand the world. DeLillo has always been a very precise writer and this pays off particularly well here.
Since his 1997 magnum opus Underworld, DeLillo’s later novels have tended to be slighter affairs, small books that have sometimes seemed overly simplistic compared to the novels that made his name, White Noise and Libra in particular.
Zero K is a novel to place with his best even though the second half of the book, which takes place two years after Artis’s death and explores Jeffrey’s relationship with a new woman and her adopted Ukrainian son, is harder to follow in places than the first.
At nearly 80 years old, DeLillo has outlived many of his contemporaries. What is most astonishing about this late work is not its obsession with death but that it pulsates with such richly recorded life. Greenways Publishing, £12.99 CELEBRATE the 50th anniversary of England’s greatest football achievement with this nostalgic book about the 1966 World Cup. It contains contributions from several legendary and award-winning Daily Express football journalists and a foreword by George Cohen MBE, England’s World Cup-winning right-back. Packed with photos and cartoons this evocative tribute relives every game in the tournament.
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