LITERARY FICTION
A WEEKEND IN NEW YORK by Benjamin Markovits (Faber £14.99)
THE creepingly autumnal weather in Markovits’s latest novel, which covers 48 hours in a beautifully sketched Manhattan at the end of August 2011, can’t help but suggest itself as a metaphor for its central character’s career.
Long gone are tennis pro Paul Essinger’s days in the sun. Now, at the age of 33, he’s preparing for his last U.S. Open, not to mention his postretirement existence.
The contest is the cue for an Essinger reunion and for Markovits to range freely between the consciousnesses of three different generations (and, very occasionally, into the future — this is the first in a projected series), as he pursues themes including inheritance, national and cultural identity, ambition, failure and how on earth an extended clan can ever agree come feeding time.
A capacious novel, but never baggy, it’s intimate, funny and agile enough to capture the ever-shifting sands on which family life is built — scenes in which multiple conversations conducted simultaneously are masterfully done.
AFTER THE PARTY by Cressida Connolly (Viking £14.99)
‘HAD it not been for my weakness, someone who is now dead could still be alive.’ With a hook like that, I defy you not to read on.
Yet it’s something of a red herring, since the meaty mystery it appears to promise is not at the heart of this delve into the world of Oswald Mosley’s (numerous) female supporters.
Phyllis Forrester is our focus: meek, malleable, impeccably upper middleclass and utterly unlike her sisters, the pantomime snob Patricia and the practical Nina who, in the summer of 1938, ropes Phyllis into helping at summer camps for ‘the Movement’.
Of course, we know what lies ahead and the narrative periodically jumps to 1979, with Phyllis describing in her own words her wartime internment.
Connolly, an unerring storyteller who excels at both period and place, manages the two strands superbly and it’s the urgency of the embittered Phyllis’s voice as she recounts her unexpectedly heartbreaking trajectory that, in fact, keeps the pages turning.
CAROLINE’S BIKINI by Kirsty Gunn (Faber £14.99)
AS WE’RE told on the title page, Caroline’s Bikini is less a novel than ‘an arrangement of a novel with an introduction and some further material’. Should that put you off?
Well, it depends on whether a 300-page footnoted account of a futile passion that transposes the medieval tradition of courtly love to present-day Richmond, while gleefully deconstructing the novel form, is the kind of thing that floats your boat.
Gunn is best known for 2012’s The Big Music, which took as its inspiration the sound of Scottish bagpipes.
A straightforward realist yarn was, therefore, never on the cards and the sprightliness with which Gunn goes about her enterprise is unflagging.
However, admirably original as it is, the end product is somewhat like its hopelessly devoted, heartsick hero — requiring rather a lot of indulgence.