LITERARY FICTION
THE GOLDEN RULE by Amanda Craig (Little, Brown £16.99, 400 pp)
I LOVED the opening to this tonally unpredictable state-of-the-nation novel, which nods to Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers On A Train. Hannah, who once worked in advertising, is struggling to get by as a cleaner in London. Her abusive husband has left for another woman and won’t help support their young daughter. Hannah wishes she could kill him — and on the train to Cornwall, she meets a woman who vows to do just that, as long as Hannah bumps off Jinni’s own husband, too . . .
It’s a cracking start, but the sense grows that this likeable novel ultimately sets itself too great a workload. Craig uses the injustice of Hannah’s story to explore class prejudice, male violence and the plight of Generation Rent.
But these political intentions sit awkwardly with the more obviously knockabout aspects of the narrative, not least a fairytale plot centred on a will-they-won’t-they romance between Hannah and the man she agrees to kill.
THE GROUP by Lara Feigel (JM Originals £16.99, 336pp)
FEIGEL’S first novel follows a mainly arts-and-media set of female Oxford graduates approaching their 40s, in a modern update of U.S. writer Mary McCarthy’s 1954 novel The Group, about a circle of university friends navigating adulthood and feminism.
Instead of the Great Depression, we’ve got the Brexit transition period, with the stories of Kay, Polly, Helena et al told by Stella, a book editor secretly writing about them all.
Amid the tangle of work and motherhood, they privately weigh up each other’s choices, as various rivalries and dalliances sprout up against a backdrop of shifting sexual mores in the wake of #MeToo. Probing how far it’s possible, or desirable, to live unfettered by external obligations, the novel sympathetically bears witness to what one character knowingly calls ‘middle-class problems’.
Meditative, analytical and ever so slightly rambling, it’s coolly done, but perhaps overly sombre: Anna Hope’s recent novel Expectation has a breezier touch with similar material.
THE WEEKEND by Charlotte Wood (W&N £14.99, 288pp)
THIS sharply observed and smartly paced Australian novel follows three women in their 70s, who gather to clear the house of a mutual friend who has recently died.
There’s widowed novelist, Wendy; an out-of-work actress, Adele; and Jude, a former restaurant owner secretly seeing a married businessman.
As the novel cuts between their separate trains of thought, there’s a steady crackle of irony from the gap between how the women judge each other and what they actually say.
Buried grudges boil over after Adele seeks to reignite her career by making eyes at a young director. It might all seem a downward gear change from the violent feminist dystopia of Wood’s previous novel, The Natural Way Of Things, but don’t be fooled.
This is a stealthier book: smuggled into its tender but clear-eyed portrait of long-term friendship is a troubling and comfortless picture of old age as a loss of dignity that hits the sexes unequally.