LITERARY FICTION
NELLY DEAN by Alison Case (The Borough Press £12.99)
IT’S a brave author who strays into Bronte country, but American scholar Case has thrown herself wholeheartedly into her companion piece to Wuthering Heights.
Nelly Dean was housekeeper at the Heights and the novel’s main narrator. Here, she sets about filling the gaps left by her original account of events, weaving ‘a homespun grey yarn . . . among the bright-dyed and glossy dark threads of the Earnshaws and Lintons’.
This isn’t false modesty, since Cathy and Heathcliffe are little more than bit players for much of the novel and their fireworks largely offstage.
Instead, the focus is on Nelly herself, her doomed love for her childhood sweetheart, Hindley, and her devotion to his son, Hareton, to whom she is nothing short of a mother.
There are a couple of daring twists along the way, but the tendency of Case’s characters to talk in paragraphs makes for rather slow going.
Given that Nelly’s tale extends to nearly 400 pages, you could be forgiven for feeling that a little more glossy darkness would perhaps not have gone amiss.
DISCOUNT by Casey Gray (Duckworth Overlook £11.99)
THE workplace novel is almost a subgenre in the U.S., with heavyweights such as David Foster Wallace and Dave Eggers producing notable examples.
Gray’s debut isn’t quite in the same league as these but, like his illustrious predecessors, he capitalises on the opportunity to combine social commentary with satire as he observes the 9-to-5 — or, in this case, 24/7-364 ½ functioning of a giant superstore.
In Discount, we’re concerned with a single New Mexican branch of a Walmarttype empire as its staff anticipate a visit from the company’s CEO.
More than 35 characters make for numerous threads, but it’s the store’s customers who provide the most memorable moments: Dolly, a retired nurse living in a mobile home with her recently deceased husband, is great value, as are the Cotton family — especially hapless father Larry and his teenage goth son, Keith.
Less strong is the Limon clan, whose work in the store is supplemented by drug-dealing and gun-running.
However, this alternately hilarious, macabre and tragic novel is impressive, and worth reading for Gray’s excellent dialogue alone.
AMONG THE TEN THOUSAND THINGS by Julia Pierpont (Oneworld £14.99)
THERE’S something a little depressing about the opening of this acclaimed American debut, concerned as it is with the tawdry fallout of an exposed affair.
New York artist Jack Shanley is the outed philanderer, but it is his 11-year-old daughter, Kay, who discovers the evidence: a package of printed emails sent anonymously to her mother, ballet dancer Deb. (Jack and Deb are the kind of couple who could only exist in a novel. . .)
Meanwhile, their hormonal son Simon is experiencing the usual coming-of-age dramas. It’s all a little ho-hum until an interlude telescopes time to show us the Shanleys’ futures in the years ahead.
It’s a bold move, but one that feels a little too engineered to invest the next section of Pierpont’s novel with the pathos it otherwise might.
Yet, in spite of these flaws, things suddenly catch fire in the final third as the narrative follows the fractured family to their Rhode Island summer house.
And if there’s the odd try-too-hard line, it’s more than compensated for by Jack’s observation that ‘the best use of family was having it in front of other people’.