LITERARY FICTION
SMILE by Roddy Doyle
(Cape £14.99) RODDY DOYLE is regarded as one of the literary custodians of Ireland’s soul, but in truth, the 1993 Booker winner has written few novels worth reading since Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha. Until this one.
It’s narrated by Victor, a radio DJ and wannabe writer whose recent divorce from Rachel, a famous chef and TV personality, has found him back among the streets, pubs and former friends of his childhood.
But there are phantoms in these streets, including a vaguely sinister ex-school friend Victor can’t quite place, and the persistent memory of an abusive encounter with his head teacher at his Christian Brothers school.
Doyle very cleverly drops hints that all is not well in this slithery, stealthily deceptive novel, which dramatically pulls the rug from under the reader with a final image not just of one damaged man, but of an impotent country poisoned to the core by a history it cannot shake off.
It left me with goosebumps and, a week on, a sour, sad taste still in my mouth.
THE GROWING SEASON by Helen Sedgwick
(Harvill Secker £12.99) WHAT would the world look like if both men and women could give birth? What if the process were painless and failproof, and involved carrying the growing embryo in a special removable pouch, rather than a woman’s womb?
That’s the future scenario Helen Sedgwick sets out in this languid, feminist-flavoured thriller, in which the family behind a ground-breaking fertility firm find themselves in the media spotlight when the granddaughter of the founder suffers a stillbirth after a pouch pregnancy.
A journalist scents scandal — that the firm might even be covering up other stillbirths — and the novel follows both this investigation and the complicated network of emotional ties that binds the family together.
Sedgwick stirs in big questions about modern gender politics, but her book loses focus, thanks to a meandering narrative that flips back and forth in time and involves too many scantily drawn characters. A shame, as the premise is superb.
THE GOLDEN HOUSE by Salman Rushdie
(Cape £18.99) DONALD TRUMP has gifted most contemporary novelists a big challenge — his America is so garish and seemingly fantastical, it almost seems to be laying down the gauntlet to the powers of fiction.
That, at least, is one of the many ideas running through Rushdie’s latest antic novel, which begins and ends with the Obama presidency, but is unquestionably steeped in America’s immediate reality.
It’s narrated by René, a young man who has inveigled his way into the obscenely wealthy household of the mysterious Goldens — a family who, in a grossly inflated version of the American narrative of selfinvention, have unknown origins and a nomenclature that invokes its own mythology: the patriarch is called Nero, his three adult sons Petronius, Lucius Apuleius and Dionysus.
René is also a film-maker, and we see the pile-up of personal tragedy that afflicts the Goldens in the form of a script.
The magic realism for which Rushdie is so renowned gives way here to a sort of heavily amplified realism, but the main impression is that of a novelist in thrall to his own bombastic talent.