New year, new voices

Orlando Bird picks some superb debut novels, which flit from Sixties campus radicals to spoilt brats in Rio de Janeiro

New year, new fiction – and the biggest noises are coming from the other side of the Atlantic. No surprises there, you might think, with a weary shrug. (In 2016, they were over here, taking our Booker Prize.) What is surprising, though, is the fact that these big, ambitious novels are debuts.

For a while now, America’s younger writers have been sacking off the hunt for the allknowing, all-telling Great American Novel, opting for tricksier, more intimate forms. “When history came alive, I was sleeping,” says Adam Gordon, a poet traipsing round Madrid at the time of the 2004 bombings in Ben Lerner’s 2011 debut, Leaving the Atocha Station. It’s a long way from The Naked and the Dead.

But things are changing. We’ve recently had Garth Risk Hallberg’s gigantic City of Fire; now two more big, sweeping American debuts have come and kicked the door down:

by Yaa Gyasi ( Viking, £12.99) and Nathan Hill’s (Picador, £16.99), which could well be the most ambitious novel of the year.

Hill’s 620-pager, which took him 10 years to write but mostly doesn’t feel like it, touches on the 2008 financial crash, the Occupy protests, the 1968 Chicago riots, academic life, small-town life, fad diets, pointless apps – and much else. At the centre of all this is Samuel Andreson-Anderson, a gawky college teacher in his thirties who, besides having a surname that typifies a certain kind of American literary humour, is failing to write a longoverdue novel and throwing most of his energy into an online roleplaying game called Elfscape. So far, so Creative Writing MFA; but Hill uses these components to spin an original, funny and affecting story.

Samuel’s mother, Faye, left him

Homegoing The Nix

when he was a child, and he hasn’t heard from her since. Then, suddenly, she’s all over the TV (duly going viral), flinging gravel at a boorish politician of the sort familiar to anyone who’s been conscious over the last 18 months. Initially spurred on by a financial incentive, Samuel goes in search of her. The novel ping-pongs between 2011, Samuel’s childhood in the Eighties and Faye’s childhood in the Fifties, and Samuel gradually finds out about his mother’s stifling upbringing in Iowa, as well as her later involvement in the campus radicalism of the Sixties, with its “wiry beards, spit-flecked mustaches, sweat-stained headbands… that smell of secondhand store musk and tobacco”.

Naturally, there’s a role for Allen Ginsberg, who flits in and out the the action – a camera in one hand, a copy of the Tibetan Book of the Dead in the other. A lot of the time he sits cross-legged, giving his blessing to the free love and the half-baked politics (“There is no you. There is only the universe and beauty”). It’s characteristic of Hill that, while his sympathies are clearly with the counterculture, he’s alive to its absurdities.

Hill has admitted that, over the years, The Nix “became the repository for just about every good idea I had”. Luckily, most of these good ideas are genuinely good, and he treats his sprawling subject with incredible confidence and agility. The historical shifts prove an effective way of tracing American disillusionment with idealism.

The prose is lithe and energetic. Hill specialises in the jittery maximalism of the David Foster Wallace school of writing – Samuel has five ways of crying, all carefully tabulated – but he can switch to a steadier eloquence that might have come from the age of Updike (“Those great Midwestern clouds like floating avalanches”). The novel’s forays into gaming culture have an almost confessional feel, and there’s one side-character – a fat, frazzled high priest of MMORPG (that’s “Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games”) known as Pwnage – who is so precisely and painfully realised that you can practically smell the Dorito dust on his fingertips, the Mountain Dew warming by the computer screen.

Like other characters in this book, though, Pwnage provides a single plot hinge; and though he’s no mere caricature, he has virtually nothing to do with the rest of the story. Hill uses him mainly as an opportunity to write well. As someone who enjoys literature’s riffers (like Martin Amis, or Foster Wallace), I don’t have a problem with this – but I couldn’t help wondering, half-way through a chapter-long sentence, whether some of the set-pieces were trying to make up for shortcomings elsewhere.

One of these could be the fact that it’s unclear what novel Hill wants to write (there are several here, really). For all its postmodern hyperactivity, some of the most accomplished sections in The Nix are those focused on the family drama of Samuel and his mother. Despite his tongue-in-cheek scepticism (“Austerity is very hip right now”), it’s clear that Hill, like his protagonist, is also itching for sincerity, grounding, resolution. The need is urgent enough, in fact, that he’s willing to write some fairly bad sentences to satisfy it (“If you’re not afraid of it, it’s not real change”). But on this showing, it seems like Hill is a writer who can do pretty much what he wants. We’ll have to wait and see what he chooses.

Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing is half the length of The Nix but its historical sweep is roughly four times as wide, examining the twin legacies of colonialism and slavery. It’s not downplaying the gravity of these themes to acknowledge that they have already been covered extensively. But Gyasi, who was born in Ghana and grew up in the States, has a different angle. Homegoing begins on the Gold Coast in the 18th century, and one of its central preoccupations is with how Africans became active participants in the slave trade.

Esi and Effia are half-sisters, unaware of each other’s existence. Caught up in a squalid bit of local power-broking, Effia is married off to a British officer. An unenviable fate – but Esi’s is much worse. She is snatched by a rival village, sold into slavery and eventually shipped to America. Each chapter follows one of the sisters’ descendents, shifting between both sides of the Atlantic and ending up – via the Deep South plantations and Civil War-era Baltimore – in present-day California.

I was particularly impressed by the Ghanaian sections. Gyasi imbues indigenous life with richness and dignity, in a style that owes something – though by no means everything – to Chinua Achebe. The smell of sizzling yams hangs in the air, the landscape spreads dazzlingly wide, and people think nothing of walking 10 miles to see a neighbour. On the other hand, this is no paean to the good times before things fell apart. Superstition thrums in the background, and regional antagonisms – once settled by a raid or two – become levers in the colonial game of divide-andconquer (“The Asante had power from capturing slaves. The Fante had protection from trading them”).

The intricate, arching structure is a risk – one you have to admire Gyasi for taking. It serves as the engine for a powerful message, giving a lineage to shattered families and an identity to people stripped of their names, as well as highlighting the more destructive aspects of inheritance: guilt and a sense of entrapment. On a page-bypage level, though, it sometimes achieves the opposite. As each chapter beings with a new

The all-knowing, all-telling Great American Novel is back in fashion