The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Looking for validation in all the wrong places
Remember Queenie? Now meet Dimple, a 30-year-old would-be influencer with daddy issues who is embroiled in a crime caper
PEOPLE PERSON by Candice Carty-Williams
368pp, Trapeze, T £10.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £12.99, ebook £6.99
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Poor Dimple. The hapless heroine of Candice Carty-Williams’s new novel bears a certain resemblance to Queenie, the eponymous protagonist of her 2019 hit debut, which scooped book of the year at the British Book Awards and was nominated for a fistful of other prizes.
Like Queenie, Dimple is a young, curvy black British woman looking for validation in all the wrong places. She battles low self-esteem, attracts toxic men and gets into scrapes. She, too, is a bit lost – aged 30, she’s still living at home with bossy, dipsomaniac mum Janet, trying to be an influencer. And, like Queenie, her real affirmation comes from a straight-talking circle of confidantes; where the former had her gal-pals, Dimple has her half-siblings. It is the evolving relationships between these five contrasting characters, bound by a lifetime of daddy issues, that form the book’s emotional core.
British-Jamaican bus driver, aspiring DJ and all-round ne’er-dowell Cyril Pennington has fathered five children with four different women. Although they are scattered around south London, his offspring have only met once, until one – Dimple, naturally – finds herself in the mother of all scrapes, when the boyfriend she’s trying to dump ends up unconscious on her kitchen floor. Like any good millennial, Dimple is initially more concerned about her cracked iPhone than Kyron’s cracked skull, but after breezily concluding, “he’s probably dead”, she calls Nikisha, the efficient older sister she hasn’t seen in years, who summons the other siblings. They can’t tell the police (“they never believe us”), so are about to bury the body, but it vanishes. When Kyron’s mum raises the alarm, Dimple tries to divert suspicion by agreeing to post a video appealing for his return, which goes viral. Then Kyron reappears and starts making life very uncomfortable. Can Dimple and her family outwit him?
It is an entertaining if farfetched caper, which doesn’t take itself too seriously – and doesn’t lead where you expect. Whenever you think Carty-Williams is veering too far into sentimentality or therapyspeak, she defuses things with a joke. Kyron is a plot device to unite the Penningtons against a common enemy. He’s a pantomime villain (men don’t come off well in this book), but where Carty-Williams really excels is family dynamics, from the crackling sibling dialogue to the comic set pieces, such as their grandmother’s funeral.
The author describes herself as “the result of an affair between a Jamaican cab driver and a dyslexic Jamaican-Indian receptionist”, and in People Person she explores the impact of paternal unreliability and abandonment. What makes it so uplifting is the new generation’s decision not to repeat their father’s failures and to rebuild their family from the emotional wreckage he has left. It also demonstrates how influencer culture damages the most isolated and insecure by inviting them to expose themselves to the fickle judgments of strangers. Dimple believes “projecting an image… to ‘the world’ would protect her from how harsh the world was”. Just as online fame starts losing its allure, her popularity skyrockets – but she knows it won’t be long before the tide turns.
Carty-Williams draws an acute portrait of the stifling motherchild relationship that can develop in two-person families, and how cotton-wool parenting makes someone “too soft”. Despite the psychological framing, however, I was frustrated by Dimple’s selfdestructive hopelessness (as I was by Queenie’s). This is central to her journey – “It’s time to grow up now,” says Nikisha – but still, her naivety could have been done with a lighter touch.
The omniscient narration sometimes sounds gently admonitory: “It was no way to live at 30, this emotional dependence, but Janet had indulged it so much that neither of them realised that it was a problem.” Such exposition is the secret to Carty-Williams’s broad appeal – her books can be enjoyed by teenagers upwards (Queenie was in fact marketed as a young adult novella).
Carty-Williams has written another big-hearted blockbuster that will make her many fans smile and ache. She paints a vivid picture of the pressures on young people in modern Britain and a poignant one of how a vulnerable outsider can, with the right network – of the non-digital variety – find a sense of belonging and self-acceptance.
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