FICTION

THE FEMALE PERSUASION MEG WOLITZER Chatto & Windus, 496pp, £14.99, Oldie price £11.69 inc p&p

Meg Wolitzer’s 12th novel opens in 2006, with the heroine Greer Kadetsky miserable at having to take up a place at a minor college in Connecticut after her stoner parents missed the deadline on paperwork which would have enabled her to take up her place at Yale. At college her feminist consciousness is raised by a visiting speaker – Faith Frank – who 20 years earlier had published

The Female Persuasion which advocated sisterhood over corporate jungle. Greer goes to work for Faith and the novel follows her over the next ten years as she is educated in compromise and its discontents. The theme is an old Wolitzer staple – growing up.

Most critics loved this book. Both Ferdinand Mount in the Spectator and Craig Brown in the Mail on

Sunday praised Wolitzer’s previous books before concluding that this was up with the best. Mount wrote that ‘Her sense of life’s uncertainties is as acute as her ear for humbug.’ Brown noted that ‘Apart from anything else, she is exceptionally gifted in the neglected craft of plotting.’ Alex Clark in the Guardian described the ‘immense generosity’ of the author’s ‘evenhanded portrayal of activism subjected to time and exigency; these things are hard, she seems to say, granting her characters a level of latitude not fashionable in today’s shoutfests’. Clark continued: ‘The subplot involving a tragedy that befalls Greer’s boyfriend Cory is compelling, not least because it throws a light on what happens to our concept of a successful life when reality intervenes.’

CRUDO OLIVIA LAING Picador, 176pp, £12.99, Oldie price £8.93 inc p&p

Crudo is Olivia Laing’s first foray into fiction. Her previous books have been essayistic accounts of place, interspersed with the lives of artists and writers, with shards of her own life in the mix. Crudo is all about her own life, and her state of mind as she hurtles into marriage with the poet Ian Patterson in the summer of 2017, although her narrator is part Olivia Laing, writer, and part Kathy Acker, the American punk writer who died in 1997. This is confusing because all the news stories which fill the very short novel belong to the summer of 2017. Kathy spends hours every day on the internet, following the rise of the populist right in Trump’s America. Tessa Hadley in the

Guardian explained the borrowings from Acker – acknowledged at the end – by observing that ‘Acker, too, stole stories from other people and used them as her own – it wasn’t cheating, it was a new way of thinking about personality and its permeability.’

Stuart Kelly in the Scotsman was baffled by the book’s ‘strange mixture of the blurted and the withdrawn’. Clare Lowdon in the Sunday Times referred to the ‘movement that mistrusts the artifice of the novel, and strives for “authenticity” by fusing autobiography with fiction’ and sounded a warning note: ‘Fiction is travel: temporal, geographical and psychological. And free movement is essential. If writers can only take themselves, right here, right now, for a subject, then we will end up in a sadly restricted zone.’

HOW TO BE FAMOUS CAITLIN MORAN Ebury, 320pp, £14.99, Oldie price £10.48 inc p&p

Moran’s novel How to Build a Girl was, Nick Curtis reminded us in the

Evening Standard, ‘inspired by her upbringing in a Wolverhampton council house’. This sequel describes what ‘ HTBAG’S heroine Johanna Morrigan did next’ – which was ‘remarkably similar to what Moran did: move from Wolverhampton to London, get a job on a music paper, drink and smoke a lot and have some bad sex’. Curtis admitted to being a Moran fan, and said the book ‘rattles along, powered by her typical heady blend of humour, insight and cleverness’. But he warned her against ‘repeating herself’, advising that ‘Much here feels familiar.’

The book is set in the Nineties, when, wrote Kitty Empire in the

Guardian, it was still possible for a ‘relative nobody to rock up and live somewhere cheap in Zone 2 and careen their way into a journalistic career’. It was the era of ‘peak Britpop, smoking indoors, comedy as the new rock ’n’ roll, bad sex with worse men, booze and cocaine cut with strawberry Nesquik’. Morrigan is on a roll when it all goes wrong in the form of a leaked sex tape, and for Karin Tanabe in the Washington

Post this was where the novel was ‘at its strongest’, showing ‘a young woman fighting against a society trying to strip her of her value’. Curtis was more equivocal, describing it as essentially a ‘Metoo prequel with some bolted-on journalistic observations’. Moran has shown how the ‘cheery froth of mid-1990s lad culture curdled into misogyny’ – but with the convenient benefit of hindsight.

‘Apart from anything else, Wolitzer is exceptionally gifted in the neglected craft of plotting’