The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Send nudes? Not if they’re this listless
In a bid for ‘relatability’, modern fiction has been swamped by irritatingly feeble female protagonists
224pp, Bloomsbury, T £12.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £14.99, ebook £10.49 ÌÌÌÌÌ
Pity the poor girls trapped in Saba Sams’s debut short story collection, Send Nudes. They are hesitant and reticent, their emotional range drifts from sad to listless and back again. They have no ideas, no aims, no desires. If they have a thought, it is probably about their weight, which is always too little or too much. They do things, sometimes, but without meaning to or wanting to. They are so weak I kept picturing them with their heads flopped to one side, lacking the muscular tone to keep them held upright.
Young female protagonists as helpless against the tides of fate as jellyfish washed up on the beach are a very fashionable occurrence in contemporary fiction. From the works of Kate Zambreno to Sally Rooney, from Catherine Lacey to Halle Butler, we are surrounded by girls who just can’t get it together. Not in a fun, messy and manic kind of way, but in an “if they dropped an open bag of rice and watched the grains scatter along the floor they would weep, quietly and prettily, rather than find a damn broom” kind of way. The reasons for this lack of cope are mostly left vague. Sometimes there’s an ineffectual mother, sometimes it’s just, you know, capitalism. Maybe they’re all too weak from their various eating disorders, it’s really hard to say.
The girls in Sams’s 10 stories all occupy the same nondescript time, nondescript urban area and nondescript psychological disorder. They are thinly drawn and the prose style remains as flat and flavourless as a low-sodium saltine cracker throughout. It’s as if Sams worried that if she added some flair or really any specificity or distinction to any of her girls – some of whom don’t even have names – they’d be less relatable. Not that I see the appeal of relating to a character who has all the verve of a sack of potatoes, but relatability in fiction is big now. For some reason people want only to see their problems and torments in the content they consume. And the problems here, well, you can guess. Bad sex, rape, pregnancy, body fat, these kinds of things.
There’s no urgency here; no pang of desire or hunger; nobody even needs anything. In “Snakebite”, our protagonist, Meg, has a job at a bar, not because she needs the money, she tells us, but because she needs something to fill her time. She also goes to university, not because she wants to, but because she doesn’t know what else to do. At one point in the story, she gives a man a blow job in a portable toilet, not because
she wants to, but because he’s offering cocaine in exchange. The cocaine isn’t something she really wants either, but her friend asked her to, so why not, I guess.
Meg isn’t the only one having unenthusiastic sex. Two other girls in two different stories have sex they don’t enjoy and in the course of the act they cannot find the words or the will to insist the man use a condom and apparently have never heard of the Pill, so they both inevitably end up pregnant. “I thought it made me seem aloof not to ask the boys I slept with to put a condom on.” Yeah, OK. The girls are so indistinguishable they tend to say things that any of them could have spoken. “The future, to me, was something that would just happen.” I wrote that one down in my notes. I can’t remember which story it’s from. Truly it could have been any of them.
At one point, you can feel Sams pause and wonder to herself, “What would a woman who actually wants to have sex be like?” She bites her lip as she wonders – there’s a lot of lip-biting in this collection, you have to wonder if everyone is walking around with a mouth full of blood. “I know!” she thinks to herself. “She would be insane.” And so we get Emily in the story “Here Alone”, who picks up a man named Toby at the bar. “The sex was unremarkable”, and yet of course she instantly falls in love and spends the rest of the story in desperate and very sad pursuit of Toby. She texts him, repeatedly, without hearing back first – can you imagine? Fashion magazine advice columnists would strongly disapprove.
The rather cheeky title Send Nudes implies a little gloss, a little flirtation, but there’s no knowing wink, no attempt at adornment or glamour here. If I requested nudes from a crush and then got the equivalent of these stories – a lifeless reveal of the body, too lazy or listless to find a flattering angle or create some mood lighting – I’d wipe the messages, delete the contact and block their number. Send nudes? Please. Please don’t.