Hot off the press
The best new fiction, reviewed by Eithne Farry
Books for the sunlounger
Utopia Avenue **** by David Mitchell (Sceptre, £20)
The latest novel by David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas and The Thousand Autumns Of Jacob De Zoet, takes you on a wild ride through the tail end of the psychedelic 60s.
It charts the rise of an unlikely bunch of musicians as they escalate from small-town venues with beer-soaked carpets to the glitter and gleam of fame in LA.
Groupies, drugs, music journalists and band promoters add to the period detail and a roster of famous names put in cameo appearances, from a jaunty David Bowie to a stoned Brian Jones. It’s an impeccable recreation of 1967-68 but it’s the relationship between the band members that really makes this book sing.
Elf is a folk singer with a history of awful boyfriends. Dean is a dirt-poor, down-on-his-luck bassist with an abusive father. Posh Jasper de Zoet is a guitar genius with “emotional dyslexia” and mental health issues, plagued by a knocking sound in his head apparently caused by the trapped consciousness of another person. Along with jazz drummer Griff, impresario Levon brings them together to form the band Utopia Avenue.
Mitchell teases out their stories, insightfully describing how they transform their life experiences into songs and how fame and all that it brings, good and bad, changes the way they feel about themselves and each other. It’s a lively, colourful, emotional roller-coaster of a read that lingers long after you turn the final page.
Small Pleasures **** by Clare Chambers (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £14.99)
It’s 1957 and Jean Swinney is living a life of silent despair. She’s 39, disappointed in love, bored, lonely, and sharing a house with her demanding mother. Work isn’t much better
– she’s a journalist on the local newspaper, a “dogsbody and the only woman at the table” compiling cleaning and gardening tips.
But then elegant, smart Gretchen Tilbury contacts the paper with an outlandish claim – that her daughter, 10-year-old Margaret, is the result of a virgin birth. Jean is sent to interview “Our Lady of Sidcup” and as she begins to uncover the truth about this tantalising tale finds herself becoming part of the Tilbury family.
Gretchen makes her a beautiful dress, Margaret makes her laugh, and charming, courteous, modest Howard, Gretchen’s husband, makes her wonder if happiness and love could still be within her grasp.
It is a glorious piece of storytelling, beautifully quiet and understated, where powerful emotions and awful revelations are treated with a reserve that make them all the more heartbreaking and devastating.
The Weekend **** by Charlotte Wood (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £14.99)
Sylvie, the long-time friend of Jude, Wendy and Adele, has died and the three surviving women gather at her ramshackle seaside holiday home to sort through her belongings before the house is sold.
The trio are very different. Jude is thin, reserved and cool, a once-famous restaurateur conducting a years-long affair with a married man. Untidy, intelligent, widowed Wendy is a renowned academic with her elderly, dying dog in tow. And there’s Adele, a dazzlingly over-the-top actress whose star is on the wane and whose romantic entanglements are coming undone, leaving her as good as homeless.
Fond memories, fraying tempers, personality clashes and the trials of old age frequently undermine the poignancy of the women’s task. And as the weather worsens and a storm builds at sea, the very
foundations of their friendship are shaken. An astute, tenderly funny novel about female friendship, ageing and loss.
Rodham *** by Curtis Sittenfeld (Doubleday, £16.99) Rodham ventures into political fantasy, imagining a world where Hillary turned down big, handsome Bill Clinton and headed into her own “singular future”.
It’s an enticing premise but there’s something hollow at the heart of Rodham. It’s difficult to suspend disbelief for this imagined life when there’s so much reality to get in the way.
Still, Sittenfeld’s Hillary is admirably ambitious, beginning as an “awfully opinionated” girl in a Chicago suburb, heading to Yale Law School where she meets boisterous Bill.
They fall in love but before long his philandering ways scupper their relationship. He asks her to marry him, she says no and fact deviates into fantasy as Hillary navigates treacheries and tries to achieve her aims as a single woman in a world ruled by men.
Blue In Chicago And Other Stories **** by Bette Howland (Picador, £12.99)
In these beautifully bittersweet stories, Bette Howland observes the nitty-gritty details of everyday lives set against the backdrop of a poor crime-ridden city, usually Chicago.
Howland is funny, ruefully poetic and effortlessly perceptive on the push-pull nature of relationships between parents and their grown-up children, exploring the way childhood affection is often replaced by alienation and irritation.
In the title story, the narrator travels across the city by bus to join her Jewish family at a cousin’s wedding and, gimleteyed, watches her attention-seeking mother, “grimly prominent” in a black-and-white dress “like priests in their habits”.
The same sad sharpness features in the hauntingly sad, darkly humorous How We Got The Old Woman To Go. As the relatives of an old, independent, “defenceless” grandmother swerve the burden of care, their own relationships come under scrutiny.
Howland is also brilliant on the melancholy of unsuccessful marriages. It’s a perceptive, poignant and astute collection of stories from a 20th-century writer whose rediscovery is long overdue.
The Blind Light **** by Stuart Evers (Picador, £18.99)
Subtle and sombre, this sweeping novel tells the entwined stories of working-class Drum and well-to-do, well-connected Carter. They meet in the late 1950s during National Service and after Drum saves Carter from being fleeced by fellow conscripts in a card game, he ensures they’re both assigned roles in the cushy catering corps.
They end their service in Cumbria where the effects of an atomic strike are recreated for military training. This macabre setting – melted streets and shops, blasted mannequins for dead bodies – and the threat of imminent nuclear apocalypse add a claustrophobic edge to a complicated friendship, the damage wrought by long-term fear slowly warping personalities and perspectives. Love, luck, debts and domestic life play out against a historical backdrop that takes in the Cuban Missile Crisis, strikes, civil unrest and the rise of rave culture.
Tennis Lessons *****
By Susannah Dickey (Doubleday, £14.99)
The narrator of Susannah Dickey’s absolutely brilliant debut is dogged by ugly thoughts, an unruly body and the desperately sad awareness that she is “wrong and strange and different”.
This compelling coming-of-age story touchingly captures the awkward, aching longing of a misfit, trying to find a way to fit into a world where her wayward perspective marks her out as odd, and she feels like a disappointment to parents who hoped for a more conventional child.
In short, sharp and darkly funny snippets, Dickey takes us through her unnamed narrator’s childhood, her teenage years and young womanhood, where dead pets, bad dates, sexual assault and drunk driving are milestones in a life coloured by “sporadic sadness” but where banter with a best friend can buoy you up when life’s short on laughs.
It is shot through with honesty, too. The narrator is both victim and bully as Dickey pinpoints that terrible teenage inclination to inflict casual cruelty on others, even as you suffer similarly hurtful behaviour yourself. Ultimately, however, this is an optimistic read about a woman discovering a solid sense of self and recognising the rueful truth that everyone is a little lost and longing to belong.