LITERARY FICTION
CHERRY by Nico Walker
(Cape £14.99, 336 pp) WALKER, a former U.S. Army medic in Iraq, wrote this debut novel about a traumatised veteran while serving a jail term for bank robbery, so you get the feeling he knows what he’s talking about.
A bruising dispatch from the frontline of the American opioid crisis, as well as from Operation Iraqi Freedom, it’s narrated by a college dropout who enlists when his lover, Emily, says she’s off to Canada to study.
His matter-of-fact account of his regiment’s various cock-ups and crimes feels raw and immediate, but with plangent moments, too.
Browsing the Ikea catalogue in his downtime, he pictures the furniture he’ll buy with Emily once his tour is over — a vision that fades when the pair slip into drug addiction as the final quarter rushes by in a cold sweat.
Often wryly funny in its hard-won wisdom, the laconic staccato of Cherry’s narration is ultimately crushing in the utter hopelessness of the American nightmare it outlines.
BEAUTIFUL REVOLUTIONARY by Laura Elizabeth Woollett
(Scribe £12.99, 416 pp) WOOLLETT’S 2016 debut The Love Of A Bad Man drew on 12 true stories of women who fell for violent criminals, including Marceline, wife of U.S. cult leader Jim Jones, who led more than 900 of his followers to their death at his commune in Jonestown, Guyana, in 1978.
Now, she has used the massacre as the basis for a sprawling ensemble novel, starting from the point of view of newlywed graduates Lenny and Evelyn, who witness the cult in its early days in California when Lenny swaps military service in Vietnam for work in a local psychiatric hospital.
Soon, Evelyn, a pastor’s daughter, finds the creepily charismatic Jones more of a draw than skivvying for her dope-smoking husband, who submits to escalating humiliations as Jones worms his way into their marriage.
An almost surreally nasty dramatisation of the mechanics of power, it’s expertly done, but left me queasy about why you would tell this story as fiction.
IMPROVEMENT by Joan Silber
(Allen & Unwin £14.99, 240 pp) IT’S increasingly common to structure a novel as a string of implicitly connected episodes, instead of a story running from A to B (think David Szalay’s All That Man Is).
Improvement, from acclaimed U.S. writer Joan Silber, shows the method’s pros and cons. It turns on the presentday tale of Reyna, a single mother in New York, who ducks out of a contraband scam in which her boyfriend is caught up soon after he is let out of prison for small-time drug-dealing.
The butterfly effect produced by Reyna’s backtracking includes a fatal road accident that leaves another woman wondering why her lover never gets back in touch.
But, while some of Silber’s vignettes feel urgent, others don’t, as when Reyna’s aunt recalls life in Turkey, or when we spend time with German tourists smuggling antiquities.
As an exercise in literary pointillism, it’s often beautifully observed, but it’s also moot how much the stories gain from being brought together this way.