Novel of the week Francesca Carington

At the start of Hex, the second novel from the Brooklyn-dwelling Rebecca Dinerstein Knight, Nell, a PhD botanist, is expelled from Columbia after a fellow student poisons herself in their lab. Nell leaves with some smuggled seeds, resolved to continue their work to detoxify plant-based poisons.

She laments her separation from her supervisor, the cold and elegant Joan, with whom Nell is all-consumingly obsessed. “The biggest loss is you: my chime, my floorboard. You are my night milk,” she writes, in the first of her ever-more-mad metaphors for Joan.

Despite the darker-side-of-academia premise, Hex is less Donna Tartt and more Ottessa Moshfegh: sardonic and strange. The novel is a delightfully odd pastiche of courtly love: Joan, the unobtainable object of her devotion, Nell, the solipsistic lover worshipping in academic exile. When Nell’s ex-boyfriend (who Joan starts sleeping with) asks what the deal is, Nell says, “I like to know her, I like to please her, I would report the weather to Joan if I could.” She recalls her early days of infatuation: “as the city teemed with humidity and odor, I thought it might be pleasant to be one layer of uncolored nail polish lying in rest over your fingernails.”

There’s something earthy and animal about Nell – she eats with her fingers, sleeps on the floor in an apartment filled with soil. She portrays herself as a loner – despite having a group of exceptionally good-looking academic friends, who also get sucked into the “Joan thing”, culminating in a bizarre dinner party and a Bollywood dance.

There’s a rhythmic mannerism to the novel that hypnotises even as it bewilders: “you are essential to me and I am okay to you”, or, more randomly: “Anybody should punch anybody in the face with beauty, at any time, without getting punched back by a penis.” Hex is confessional and confounding; sometimes, plain weird. But, with its dark humour and loopy lyricism, it bewitches.