LITERARY FICTION
WHAT WILL SURVIVE OF US by Howard Jacobson (Cape £20, 304 pp)
JACOBSON, 81, seems out to give the reader a gentler time than usual in this romcom about how love at first sight strikes a middle-aged man and woman who ditch their long-time partners to shack up.
The story centres on Lily, a television documentary maker, and Sam, a playwright, who get together while filming in Mexico before sealing the deal by sampling the S&M scene in London’s Soho and Amsterdam.
Sure, there’s a dollop of dirty talk — it’s a Jacobson novel after all.
But he dials down the usually relentless rib-digging gags poured into books such as his Donald Trump satire Pussy, and there’s no sign of the kind of edgy conceit that has previously animated his provocative comedies of Jewishness in the shadow of the Holocaust.
Instead, we have a warm-hearted examination of how Lily and Sam’s coup de foudre endures down the decades. Touching, yes, yet oddly short on electricity.
I’M NEW HERE by Ian Russell-Hsieh (Scribner £14.99, 240 pp)
THIS punchy debut follows Sean, a Taiwanese-British photographer who leaves London to jet off to Taipei in search of belonging after he is sacked from his job and dumped by his girlfriend.
Instead, he falls into a self-loathing spiral of random hook-ups and junk food, reported with almost anaesthetic blankness. Our sense of what exactly is going on begins to fracture under the pressure of the protagonist’s psychological breakdown once he finds himself hired by a new client, a shadowy older man encountered in a doughnut joint.
If the unreliable narration of I’m New Here shares DNA with cult classics Fight Club and American Psycho, its sour comic candour also recalls the recent vogue for spiky novels flaunting the unrestrained appetites of women behaving badly (think Eliza Clark’s Boy Parts or Sheena Patel’s I’m A Fan).
A compelling character study, even if it’s ultimately more of a voice and an attitude than a story.
FOURTEEN DAYS ed by Margaret Atwood and Douglas Preston (Chatto & Windus £20, 384 pp)
ASSUMING you haven’t already had your fill of lockdown stories, this is an intriguing take on the genre: a collaborative novel written by 36 North American writers, imagining a socially-distanced rooftop gathering of tenants in a New York apartment block as they share stories at the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Although seriousness prevails, there is a mix of moods, genres and protagonists, from a pest exterminator to an Iraq veteran, a woman widowed by a plane crash and even William Shakespeare during his own experience of lockdown, when plague closed the theatres.
The different stories aren’t bylined, so you don’t know until the end of the book which of them was written by star names ( Margaret Atwood, John Grisham) or up-and-coming talents (Nafissa Thompson-Spires, Tommy Orange), and it’s surprisingly hard to guess. A neat idea, but the interest inevitably ebbs and flows over 350 pages — it feels like a period piece yet to find its moment.