LITERARY FICTION
LOVE
by Roddy Doyle (Cape £18.99, 336 pp)
TWO men catch up over several pints in several Dublin pubs over one night, and that’s about all the plot there is.
One, Joe, has just left his family for a woman both knew when they were teenagers and is trying to explain to childhood friend Davy — who lives in England with wife Faye but is over for a visit — why this new relationship feels almost mystically important. Yet none of the words he uses feels right.
On and on the chat goes, sometimes circling back i n time, built on frustrations and silences, miscommunications and misrememberings, and occasional flashes of understanding. The words said and not said build up their own weirdly propulsive inarticulacy yet, just when you wonder if it’s all a bit of a boozy journey through the emotional deep freeze of male friendship, Doyle brings it to a masterly conclusion.
A first-rate novel about the different bonds between men and the ineffable mysteries of love.
WHAT ARE YOU GOING THROUGH
by Sigrid Nunez (Virago £16.99, 224 pp)
BIG questions about mortality and responsibility rebound through this philosophical novel, yet on the surface it’s a straightforward tale about a woman caring for her dying friend.
The friend has decided to kill herself before her cancer becomes intolerable and has asked the narrator to be with her in the weeks leading up to her suicide, although the narrator was not her first choice for such a demanding task, or even her second.
The narrator — single, childless and a writer — agrees, and so begins a rigorously observed account of that process (and the unexpected moments of joy and intimacy it brings) and a freewheeling meditation on such high-stakes brain-pummellers as whether it is ethical to have children in a climate crisis, and whether the point of life is that it ends.
This sounds lofty and gloomy, yet the result is personable and invigorating, and delivered in intoxicatingly readable, washed- clean prose reminiscent of Rachel Cusk.
THE PERFECT WORLD OF MIWAKO SUMIDA
by Clarissa Goenawan (Scribe £12.99, 288 pp)
A DOOMED love affair set in Japan is at the centre of this novel. Student Ryu has fallen in love with Miwako who, although encouraging his friendship, refuses to enter a relationship with him. Eight months later her body is found in woods near a small village in the mountains.
The mysteries of Miwako’s heart hang over what happens next as the perspective moves from shattered Ryu to Miwako’s friend Chie, who learned a bit about what was troubling Miwako before she died.
And there’s Ryu’s transgender sister Fumi, a painter who has been looking after Ryu since their parents died in a car crash.
The gap between the private pain we suffer and the public image we project is explored with sensitivity and tenderness, yet while the shift into the spiritual is in keeping with the novel’s dreamy sensibilities, it feels a bit winsome and lightweight.