LITERARY FICTION
ORDINARY PEOPLE by Diana Evans
(Chatto £16.99) DIANA EVANS’S new novel was apparently inspired by John Updike’s Couples, but don’t let that put you off. The sex in it is actually sexy, for a start; it’s also an absorbing, funny and, at times, heart-breaking portrait of failing love.
We begin in South London in 2008 with a party to celebrate the election of Barack Obama but, for the two black couples at the heart of this book, the euphoria is short-lived.
Michael and Melissa have been together for 13 years, but are now facing the crunch — split up or get married — with their mouse-infested, dust-plagued and possibly haunted Crystal Palace semi serving as an obvious metaphor.
Their friends, Damian and Stephanie, are in trouble, too, with Damian chafing against domesticity and struggling to process the death of his dad.
One of the (very many) things that makes Ordinary People exceptional is the even-handed sympathy and unflinching fidelity with which Evans charts the changing weather both of her protagonists’ emotions and family life.
She excels at dialogue and she’s also a soulful, lyrical chronicler of London in all its moods and guises.
GUN LOVE by Jennifer Clement
(Hogarth £14.99) FOR most of her 14 years, Pearl France has lived in a Floridian trailer park, home being a broken-down car belonging to Margot, her troubled, runaway mother. ‘My mother was a cup of sugar,’ Pearl informs us. ‘But sweetness is always looking for Mr Bad and Mr Bad can pick out Miss Sweet in any crowd.’
So it proves and, when gun-toting drifter Eli Redmond arrives on the scene, tragedy swiftly follows.
Like Pearl’s childhood, Gun Love is divided into before and after, Margot’s death marking the beginning of Pearl’s life in care.
Clement’s book is charged with gutpunch sentences and indelible images, but this second act is particularly searing: we learn, for example, that children like Pearl are known to social workers as ‘shoots’, while another traumatised orphan speaks of herself in the third person.
Propelled to its inevitable denouement less by plot than by the intensity of its author’s prose and singular vision, this is an uncompromising snapshot of America’s ills.
ALL THE BEAUTIFUL GIRLS by Elizabeth J. Church
(4th Estate £14.99) PITCHED ( improbably) somewhere between Ballet Shoes and Paul Verhoeven’s infamous film Showgirls, this is the Sixties-set story of Kansas girl Lily Decker, who, at eight, loses her parents in a tragic crash.
Sent to live with her cold-hearted aunt and abusive uncle, she finds escape in dance, her lessons being paid for by a mysterious benefactor.
Before long, ugly duckling Lily has transformed into beatnik beauty Ruby Wilde and, soon, she’s lighting out for Las Vegas, her sights set on the chorus line.
Church is as palpably enamoured of Rat Pack-era Sin City as her gutsy heroine, who glories in the glitz, dodges the sharks, beds a real-life astronaut and, along the way, discovers who her true friends really are. It’s a headily atmospheric ride and not a little preposterous (as, on occasion, are Church’s turns of phrase).
But it’s also superb, light-as-an-ostrichfeather escapism.