Three novels for June

Drop it like it's hot

I am in the business of recommending things. I don’t have to like a book (often ‘like’ is not the word I would use about a book that stays with me), but in order to write about it, I have to understand its intention and feel satisfied with its effect. Essentially, I have to feel something. (Don’t we all!) My POV on this has always been that there are enough outlets on which to dunk on books and I’d rather talk about what I like, than what I don’t.

It means that you don’t know when I have read something that I don’t ‘get’. That you might simply assume that every reading experience I have is blissfully satisfying; that my barrier to entry is low. ‘10 out of 10! Another nice clean hit!’ Rest assured, that is not the case. It is not the case for any reader—from the obsessive, to the sporadic—unless a reader is Matilda.

There are plenty of books I’ve read, across various genres (I read if not widely, then not narrowly, either) that I have not cracked. This can feel frustrating, lonely and frankly baffling—when a book has received rapturous critical acclaim and I’m sitting there thinking, huh. It’s an important part of the reading experience, to find a book that drags as much as a book that grabs. If everything is for you, then nothing is for you, etc etc. It would be like going on holiday every month.

As a gesture of solidarity, I offer you three books that many people adore, but which I DNF in the last month: Orbital by Samantha Harvey, Fierce Attachments by Vivian Gornick and Great Big Beautiful Life by Emily Henry. Orbital won the Booker last year, Fierce Attachments was named the No.1 memoir of the last fifty years by The New York Times and Emily Henry is selling books by the squillions—but I closed each one before even half way. It does not mean you should not read them, or that you won’t like them. But for me? No claws, no hooks, and I left without a trace.

What books have really hit the spot for you recently? And which books are you not for? Let’s chew it over (kindly) in the Comments…

Now on to three recent books that I do want to gas up.

Misinterpretation by Ledia Xhoga

This is an achingly evocative and compelling debut by Albanian American writer and playwright, Ledia Xhoga. Our unnamed protagonist¹ is an Albanian translator in her late 30s, living in NYC with her husband, Billy, a film professor at NYU. It starts with her agreeing to translate for a Kosovar torture survivor, Alfred, with whom she has an instant connection. She accompanies him to the dentist, where the first signs of what he has endured reveals itself, in his inability to make a sound when hurt.

“‘I’m sorry’, said the dental nurse to Alfred. ‘I touched a nerve’. Alfred’s body slithered on the chair, but he didn’t make a peep. Then he sort of shrivelled, reminding me of an Albanian expression I hadn’t thought of in some time - U bë sa një grusht - He became small as a fist.”

Alfred—and his connection with the narrator, whose own trauma is roused when she interprets for him at the psychiatrist—opens Xhoga’s story, but Misinterpretation (a neat title) is not really about their shimmer of romantic possibility, so much as it is about the narrator’s yearn to be with other women who have run from the violence of their home country, but failed to find a safe place in NYC, busting the long-held immigrant myth that life will be better in America. Normally this is due to agonising Visa reasons (one of the women is dirty, hungry, homeless—and speaks five languages). There is also a particularly fascinating parallel between the violence that characters might have experienced in Albania, with the violence of the narrator’s life, now. Her husband, Billy, is a middle-class, educated, sensitive American professor. He is also volatile and manipulative, cratering a hole in their wall. She is arguably no safer in NYC, than she was in Albania. It is irony than the women—if not the narrator herself—wryly observe.

The narrator and Billy’s marriage bristles with tension, and so does the narrative: the narrator feels a pull towards her people, towards her work, that Billy aims to cauterise at every opportunity. He urges her not to take on translation work (it is too much for her mental health, he says) and is furious when he invites people into their home. (Like all insecure men, he wishes to keep her isolated.) The narrator begins to lie about the women she has over—mainly Kosovan Albanians who need a bath, a meal, a place to stay.

“In Billy’s world, the smallest lie was an unforgivable sin. But a knack for honesty or lack of it was shaped by one’s experience. His life had been like a basic grid with well-defined paths. Mine was a defective labyrinth in which going straight made it hard to reach the destination… [W]ho was to say that restraint and distance was the best course for everyone? Maybe it was better to blunder, to bump into things, to make ridiculous mistakes, if that brought you closer to yourself and others.”

What a fertile rally call: the idea that friction and imperfection is what brings you closer to other people, to the core of who you are. It is absolutely true.

Abandoned by Billy, suspended from her job for being too ‘close’ to Alfred and his experience, the narrator returns to Tirana, Albania, to visit her family. It is an ‘overwhelming’ place where “I was convinced that the only life that mattered was here.”

“Albania was a country that made you uneasy and tense, but alert and alive. It infuriated, exasperated, without apology or retribution, and yet one felt seen her, often even loved.”

Misinterpretation reminded me strongly of Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar and Liquid by Mariam Rahmani (which I’ll write about next month) and a little of The Coin, which Ochuko and I read for our 2 Girls 1 Book. The physical discomfort in displacement—America is a hair shirt which never softens—a kaleidiscopic manifestation of trauma, a sensory-laden journey back to the roots, where spiritual breakdown and re-birth merge.

Fulfilment by Lee Cole

Fulfilment is a wrestle between two brothers, Emmett and Joel, and an exploration of family, class, ambition and America. Emmett—single, broke, jaded—works in an Amazon-style fulfilment centre. His half-brother, Joel—married, successful, arrogant— is a university professor and writer, married to a wistful and tipsy woman named Alice. It is at the brothers’ maternal home in Kentucky that Alice and Emmett, two lost souls throwing themselves against the light bulb of fated romance, connect. The repercussions destabilise all three of them.

This is Cole’s second book and it is brilliant, with shades of Percival Everett, Jonathan Franzen, Meg Wolitzer and Katherine Heiny. (The New York Times describes his writing as “Anne Tyler by way of Sally Rooney”—neither of which fit for me.) Like Monk in Erasure, Joel becomes an academic star after he writes a lacerating piece of academic non-fiction/ memoir about growing up in working-class Kentucky—with itss high rate of opioid overdoses—in which his devoted mother fares particularly poorly. He is plagued with the knowledge that he has written a sensationalised version of the truth. He returns home, like the prodigal son, only to find that he understands little about his birthplace, his family, his marriage or, indeed, his own mind.

Cole uses a demotivated but observant Emmett to depict the rural South without sentimentality—(“[Emmett] had spent so much of his childhood around guns that seeing a collection like this never fazed him”)—and to examine how the prism of class varies on who is being seen and who is doing the seeing:

“He’d known a lot of guys like Kaleb who spent what little money they made on cars. The name for then, he supposed, was “white trash”, though he hated to think that way, and figured there were upper-class people, people in [his brother’s world, who probably thought of him as white trash.”

The book is exquisitely well-observed, with plenty of lines to make you snort: at Emmett’s fulfilment centre, his ‘Learning Ambassador’ describes it not as a warehouse, but ‘a ware-home’. (Cole himself worked in a packing centre for UPS for 3 years.) Joel’s wife Alice listens to her friend, a “dynamic neuro-modulation counsellor” (lol) lecture her on the importance of “emotional homeostatis”. Sounds expensive, notes Alice. When Alice is drunk, Joel tells her she smells like “a rancid coconut”.

Through Joel, Cole explores the various clichés of higher education, such as the ‘Surrogate Son’ archetype:

“They all shared certain reliable traits. Like Garrett, they were white and male. They spoke too often in class. They’d borrowed their personalities from podcasts or characters or movies. They had quotations tattooed somewhere on his bodies—Nietzche perhaps, Derrida, Baudrillard… and they sought to convey—with their eyes, with their whole bearing, really—that they’d encountered some darkness in life, though this darkness was often middle-class and common.”

Cole is a graduate of the infamous Iowa Writers Workshop, an MFA programme ripe for satire (see Girls). In an interview with Electric Lit (which I flagged a few months ago as I found it so interesting), the Kentucky-born author spoke about how MFA programmes produce a particular strain of writing in literary fiction that neither speaks of or to people who grow up in the working class, conservative South:

“For lack of a better term, the MFA pipeline tends to deliver writers who are coming from coastal cities. They’ve gone to elite colleges. You’re more likely to have access to the resources to make you have a good writing sample if you’ve gone to an elite college.

I was lucky to have grandparents who were always buying me books and people who were reading to me and encouraging me to be creative, but I’m not sure that that’s always the case in the South. I know my parents and some of my family members, and I’m sure this is true of other families too, they don’t want their kids to go to these elite schools, they don’t want them to get too far away from home, because then they might get ideas that run counter to the Evangelical “values” that they were raised with.

It’s hard to say how much representation in literary fiction contributes to the broader cultural conversation at all, because not many people read literary fiction… [and one of the reasons why is] if somebody growing up in rural Kentucky is made to read a piece of literary fiction in school or they go to their library and they pick up a book that’s literary and they don’t see themselves in it, if they don’t see the kinds of landscapes that they recognize, or the kinds of people that they recognize, or the kinds of vernacular that they recognize, then they might be more likely to put it away and not be interested in it. It took me a long time, way after college, to find Kentucky writers, to find writers who I could read their stories or their novels and recognize myself in them, or recognize my family members in them.”

Cole has clearly taken on the mantle of representation: to write about, and for, Kentucky. Very far away from Kentucky, on closing the book, I immediately bought a copy of Groundskeeping.

Table For One by Emma Gannon

This is the second novel from Gannon, who, through her popular newsletter, her non-fiction and now, her novels, is committed to gently dismantling cultural myth (about productivity, labour, motherhood) in order to examine not how does this look, but how does this feel?

In her debut, Olive (slug: “sometimes happiness means going against the tide”), the author explores a child-free life and the conflicts that may arise between friends who have children, are trying to have children and don’t want children. In Table For One, Gannon holds up to the light the idea that romantic love is the bedrock of happiness and fulfilment. Willow is a 30-something woman being frozen out of her job and her relationship by her co-founder and partner. She senses that her relationship (and by extension, her job) is on shaky ground, but she can’t bear to take the next step, to lean into a tentative yearn for other.

“I feel a longing that I can’t name; there’s somewhere else I want to go, but I can’t think of where I’d go without Dom… This is the plan, Willow. Build the company, move to a bigger house, have a baby, grow a family. This is what people want. This is what you want.”

The second cultural assumption that she seeks to wittily and thoroughly debunk, is that single women are always ‘up for it’: another party, another drink, another body. It’s something I’ve witnessed around the single women I love: this bizarre assumption that they always looking to fill their diary, or do shots of tequila, whilst people in relationships, people with children, are at home, have no time for others, always sealing themselves off from adventure and connection. (The myth cuts both ways.)

Single, unemployed, bewildered and weather-worn, Willow must learn to expand into her solitude.

“‘I think a bit of solitude is doing you the world of good. Don’t you think?” Carla says.

‘Maybe. I’m not really making the most of it, though. Shoudn’t I be on a hot holiday or drinking cocktails in a hotel lobby or something?’

‘You’re just in your cocoon for a bit.’”

It’s a cheering reminder that life is made up of seasons: some are for cocooning and some are for exploring. I’ve been in a cocoon through circumstance for a little while now, and now I feel buds of exploration peeping through.

There’s also a nice through-line about creative work, about women being remunerated fairly for their work (Willow is bought out of a tech company she cofounded, for a fraction of what she is owed) and about not under-selling your skill set. Willow’s ex-boyfriend is not a terrible man, but he consciously keeps her small: her work at their company is vague; her role is tied to him and to their home. She never knows exactly what her value is—in her company, in her relationship—and after a while, in herself.

Willow has a sort of identity burn-out, sending her back to her old career as a journalist for women’s media, which leads her to discover the work of and latterly begin a friendship with, a single empowerment influencer, Naz who has a thriving community of followers and a roster of painfully accurate brand activations (Naz’s book, which is both funny and spot on, is called Woman: An Island). Willow shadows Naz, in order to write a story about her. At one of Naz’s girls nights:

“I look around the room at the other women who have come tonight. Smart, interesting, curios women, showcasing their single badge with pride. Many of them are wearing Naz-style red lipstick and have her tote bag slung on the backs of their chairs. I’ve never been part of a club, but I like how these other women make me feel. Like I’m part of something, like I’m no longer alone.”

Naz is confident, sexy, yolo-ing the hell out of every day. But is she everything she purports to be?

Table For One has a synergy with Poorna Bell’s sweet novel, This Is Fine (which also features a woman coming out of a long-term relationship in which her energy/wants have been depleted/neglected) and the writing of Dawn O’Porter. It explores novelistically the happiness that can come from solo living, written about in non-fiction like Francesca Specter’s essay collection Alonement and Amy Key’s Arrangements in Blue. It’s a zippy, pleasurable read—with lots of humorous observations around journalism, influencer culture and heteronormative relationships—and steeped in accessible wisdom about how we live now—small moments where you are reminded that it up to you which cultural conversations you take part in, what trends you follow, whether you exist online, at all.

I gulped it down in an evening. If you’re going on holiday and want a book to carry you (rather than the other way round), I recommend this.

1. Anon narrators are a thing at the moment in lit fic. I’m curious as to why (I have a few theories)