LITERARY FICTION
THE ALTRUISTS by Andrew Ridker (Jonathan Cape £16.99, 320 pp)
THIS initially feels like the kind of ultra-assured, Franzen-esque American campus-set debut you have probably read before.
Widowed Arthur Alter is an academic who can’t get tenure, while his two estranged children are neatly embodied opposites: his son is a near-recluse who has squandered his mother’s fortune and his daughter a pathologically altruistic anorexic who’s desperate to give away her inheritance.
However, Ridker’s narrative soon outgrows this schematic set-up, rewinding to show us Arthur’s courtship with his late wife, Francine, and his catastrophic foray into humanitarian aid in Africa.
This is a whip-smart, wickedly funny and psychologically acute novel about the cost of doing good. It manages to satirise its characters’ folly and egotism, while keeping us wholly on their side.
The finale — a car crash of a family reunion — hits the sweet spot between hilarity and pathos with particularly excruciating precision, but there’s something to impress on every page.
LANNY by Max Porter (Faber £12.99, 224 pp)
THE sinister underbelly of the idyllic English village is a cliche that Max Porter has picked apart, sprinkled with dark, folkloric magic and stitched into a riotous, nightmarish and formally innovative patchwork of a prose poem.
In his prize-winning Grief Is The Thing With Feathers, Porter channelled Ted Hughes’s Crow, but here, the obvious debt is to Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood.
The principal voices are those of ex-Londoners Robert and Jolie, along with a reclusive artist who befriends Lanny, the couple’s nature-loving, disconcertingly gifted child. Overseeing (and hearing) all is a possibly malevolent Green Man figure — and, when Lanny disappears, we suspect he knows the answers.
There’s an incredible amount packed into this tremendous, single-sitting read, from tabloid bloodlust to soul-scouring parental guilt.
Skittery rhymes are deployed to brilliant, increasingly nerve-jangling, effect as we build towards the hallucinatory denouement. Porter seems to offer a beautifully sly concluding comment on how prejudices and preconceptions can stop us seeing the wood for the trees.
GINGERBREAD by Helen Oyeyemi (Picador £16.99, 304 pp)
SINCE 2005’s The Icarus Girl, a novel she famously wrote while at school, Oyeyemi has blazed a trail as the beloved, acclaimed author of dazzlingly inventive and unsettlingly skewed fairy tales. But I found this one hard to swallow.
The title treat is cooked up by Harriet Lee, a Londoner who hails from an island that — when she looks on Wikipedia — doesn’t exist. Nevertheless, it’s Harriet’s upbringing in this fantastical place that occupies most of the book, as she relates to her daughter how her life became intertwined with that of a well-dwelling changeling named Gretel.
Talking dolls, rearranging houses and, tantalisingly, fleeting references to Brexit, #MeToo and the generational divide are all thrown into the mix with abandon. I longed for a hinted-at satire on these last elements to develop.
But, alas, here Oyeyemi seems to be relying on sheer velocity and glorious, unabashed weirdness — as opposed to a coherent plot — to propel us through.