LITERARY FICTION
THE GUEST BOOK by Sarah Blake
(Viking €18.19) AFTER her wartime novel The Postmistress, Sarah Blake returns with a multi-generational saga about the toxic legacy of guilt among a New York banking dynasty.
It opens in the Great Depression, when Kitty, a banker’s wife, loses her young son, Neddy, in a fall from a window while playing at home — a tragedy that hardens her heart when faced with the human cost of her husband’s business in Nazi Germany.
But her suppressed emotion boils over in the 1950s, as the focus turns on her two other children: Joan, in love with a Jewish man; and jazz-loving Moss, who brings a black guest to the family’s private island off the coast of Maine.
Blake cleverly exposes the kind of racial prejudice that comes with a smile rather than a snarl. Yet her gratuitous use of Neddy’s death, as a kind of subconscious rationale for Kitty’s actions, rather seems to take the sting out of the book’s politics.
LITTLE BANDAGED DAYS by Kyra Wilder
(Picador €18.19) KYRA WILDER’S debut follows in a long tradition of feminist protest fiction portraying madness as the logical outcome of patriarchal injustice. It’s narrated by a mother who, with her pre-school daughter and baby son, leaves the US when her husband, M, gets a whizzy job in Geneva involving long work trips with an alarmingly attractive assistant.
Soon the narrator is desperately isolated, rummaging in bins at night, and riskily leaving her baby alone while spinning eccentric tales to her elder child. As the novel’s breathless sentences spiral out of control, little is stated explicitly — M’s job, for instance — generating a haziness that feels true to the narrator’s state of mind, as if we’re glimpsing events through strobe-lit fog.
But Wilder can’t quite sidestep the pitfall of how to make mental illness dramatic without being exploitative.
In the end, you can’t help but feel that the subject is more important than the book’s treatment of it.
LOW by Jeet Thayil
(Faber €20.99) THAYIL, whose debut, Narcopolis, was shortlisted for the Booker prize, is a widowed ex-addict with hepatitis C — circumstances that, remarkably, his new novel appears to draw on entirely without solemnity.
It’s a hallucinatory helter-skelter around Bombay’s lurid underworld in the company of a dandyish poet, Ullis, carrying the ashes of his editor wife, Aki, who committed suicide.
As Ullis blots out his pain by injecting and ingesting mind-bending quantities of chemicals among friends old and new, Aki makes contact from the afterlife — or maybe it’s the drugs talking . . .
While Aki’s ashes meet a somewhat predictable fate, given the cast’s propensity to hoover up any powder in sight, the mix-up ultimately leads to the novel’s most poignant moment, as well as giving us an uneasy laugh.
True, the story itself is pretty shapeless. Yet Low more or less gets by on Thayil’s charm as a born phrase-maker, his prose steering you to the sweetly upbeat finish.