LITERARY FICTION
CONVERSATIONS WITH FRIENDS by Sally Rooney
(Faber £14.99) THE post-crash boom in new Irish fiction continues with this startling debut from young writer Sally Rooney. It is so good I felt something akin to grief the moment I finished it.
It’s narrated by Frances, a 21-year-old English student in Dublin who is having an affair with a married man. She is also still deeply attached to her former girlfriend Bobbi, who has recently moved back into the flat they once shared.
Frances and Bobbi are both politically literate children of the digital revolution, with a healthy distrust of capitalist and gender constructs. They often talk in the sort of sentences that might make your eyes roll were Rooney not such a startlingly adept writer, seemingly incapable of crafting a paragraph that doesn’t glimmer with humour, compassion, insight and truth.
Frances is very different to Esther Greenwood, the heroine of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, but Rooney shares with Plath a knack for particularising a feminine consciousness, and this novel is the best I’ve read on what it means to be young and female right now.
A BOOK OF AMERICAN MARTYRS by Joyce Carol Oates
(Fourth Estate £16.99) JOYCE CAROL OATES’S new novel is the story of two families divided by a murder — though you might as well read ‘two countries’ since this book, which begins in 1999, is recognisably the story of Donald Trump’s America.
Luther Dunphy, an evangelical Christian, has shot dead Gus Voorhees, a doctor at a Midwestern abortion clinic, and faces the death penalty if he is found guilty.
He leaves behind an impoverished wife and five children steeped in the implacable conservatism of the Bible belt, their lives an inverted mirror of those of the equally intractable, liberal Voorheeses.
Yet they are bound by their similarities as much as by their differences and, throughout the agonising years of legal process, Oates carefully shows the parallel ways both families suffer.
Oates is often a sloppy writer, but there is no denying the visceral strength of the best paragraphs here, which describe what an aborted foetus looks like with the same gut-churning power as they do the killing of a man by lethal injection.
THE MINISTRY OF UTMOST HAPPINESS by Arundhati Roy
(Penguin £18.99) ARUNDHATI ROY has spent a fair bit of the 20-year gap between her Booker-winning first novel and this one writing critiques of Indian political corruption and the question of Kashmiri independence.
Both subjects are like open sores in this seething, bleeding novel, which is almost impossible to sum up, but which, very broadly speaking, is the story of two women: one a hijra (a woman born as a man) who lives in a shack in a graveyard, the other a political activist.
Roy, however, seems to make up her own wilful rules as to what defines a story in this fit-to-bursting novel, which accumulates narrative strands the way an avalanche gathers snow, and as the territory shifts from Kashmir to the 1984 Bhopal disaster to the lives of India’s destitute, one may easily lose patience.
Plenty of individual sentences sing among the clamour, but I’m afraid this congested novel put me in mind of the worst excesses of Salman Rushdie.