What I read: July

The Little Friend - Donna Tartt

Mother’s Day in Alexandria, Mississippi. Whilst the Dufresnes family is busy preparing for the celebrations, Robin, the oldest child, goes missing, his body later found hanged in a tree at the bottom of the garden. His youngest sister, Harriet, is only a baby when the murder happens, and will never remember her beloved brother, growing up with only his ghost in the house. Consumed by grief, the family fractures - Robin’s mother retreats to her bed, and their father moves away, leaving Harriet and her older sister, Allison, to be raised by their housekeeper and a trio of elderly aunts. The plot of the novel takes place 12 years after Robin’s death, during a restless summer where the fiercely independent Harriet decides to find her brother’s murderer - a quest for revenge that opens her eyes to the corruptions of her family, her town and of the American South.

This is a novel, dense and detailed and sprawling, a Southern Gothic that is heavy with a family’s stories and its collective history. Tartt has a way of building characters that are so intricate, you feel as if you have known them for years. She slowly reveals their habits and fascinations, facets of their personality that are at once both unexpected and completely obvious. Harriet is the core of this book, and she felt much more natural and genuine to me than any of the characters from The Goldfinch - the only other Tartt novel I’ve read.

Tartt cleverly shifts the focus of the story as Harriet’s world expands beyond games in her backyard into the cruel, violent traps of adulthood, drawing you into this tale until the very end. It is a murder mystery, a coming of age story and a claustrophobic examination of the perils of the American South, all rolled into one.

Nights at the Circus - Angela Carter

Carter is known by many for her retelling of fairy tales, and Nights At The Circus has the same mystical, unreal quality as those stories. Reality often becomes blurred and truth difficult to pin down. The novel explores the wonder of the circus, crawling through the underbelly of London and St Petersburg at the turn of the century with elephants in the snow of Siberia, dancing tigers and delicately jewelled eggs. This is a story of diamonds and champagne, of human greed and power and all the dirty accompaniments of glamour.

Fevvers, a woman with giant wings, is the star of the tent. She hypnotises those who come to watch, including Jack Walser, an American journalist, who interviews her and then joins the circus to follow her across the world. Fevvers is an intriguing character, her past a series of stories that climb over themselves and both Walser and us as readers are never sure how much of her is fact and how much fiction.

Carter writes in a way that reminds you of what real storytelling is. She is so talented at conjuring up an image - of a person, a city or a room, filling out each with often overwhelming details, but never shying away from exposing the rotten core, the hints of decay that linger around everything in the book.

Milk Fed - Melissa Broder

Rachel is obsessed by food. Her day is structured around her meals, a rigid routine of counting calories, restriction and constantly thinking about the one thing she denies herself. That is until she meets Miriam, an Orthodox Jewish woman who relishes in food, who eats what she wants, and delights in the joy of eating. Rachel slowly builds a relationship with Miriam, learning to give in to pleasure in its many forms. This is a book about sexuality, about bodies, about mothering. Being Jewish is also a critical element of this story - Miriam is part of a family and community who gather together and show their love through the sharing of Friday night dinners, an event that highlights the isolation of Rachel’s solo meals, eaten in the corners of places.

Milk Fed won’t be enjoyed by everyone - it’s smutty and shocking at times, dealing with issues such as disordered eating, but Broder balances this out with an honest and humorous writing style. She is clearly fascinated by the similarities between the language of food and sex, exploring how desire roots itself in many places and often verging into unexpected territory. I haven’t read anything like Milk Fed before, and enjoyed being pushed outside my reading comfort zone.

The Opposite of a Person - Lieke Marsman

This book balances between multiple genres and forms - a collection of prose, poems and essays, containing quotes from other texts and blurring the boundaries of fiction. It follows Ida, a climatologist who is offered an internship in the Alps - a position that requires her to leave behind her girlfriend Robin to study the impact of the planned removal of a hydroelectric dam in the region. The story covers everything from climate change to sexuality, bringing in philosophy and utilising multiple different forms to explore identity. There were definite strong moments in this and I found myself most drawn in by the author’s discussion of growing up, of feeling like everything is far too big and too much. However, this fragmentary form felt slightly confused to me, and led to a disconnect from the main character. I couldn’t quite decide what it was the book wanted to be.

Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro

I think a lot of what makes Never Let Me Go so powerful is the slow realisation of what is happening to these characters, so I’ll try not reveal too much in this review. It’s set in late 20th century England and Kathy H, the narrator, works as a carer, looking after people as they complete their so-called “donations”. Whilst driving the countryside roads, she takes us back over her childhood at Hailsham - a prestigious school that seems to be hiding its students from a mysterious future that looms menacingly. In particular, Kathy looks back over her friendship with Ruth and Tommy, and how this relationship came to shape so much of her life.

The novel has such a conversational tone, perfectly recounting how it is to go back over situations, to analyse them once they’ve passed and to think of all the things you could have said, all the signs you missed the first time around. How all these little stories come together to create the one tale of your life. Storytelling is such a critical part of this novel - in terms of both the stories the students are told at school and the ones they wish to create for themselves. Kathy picks up on what goes unspoken - the disguised emotions and actions of those around her, and it is this awareness that makes her such a powerful narrator.

The tragedy at the heart of Never Let Me Go slowly seeps in as the novel progresses - what does it mean to be human? To be tangled with others and to be in charge of your own life? It’s a quietly beautiful read, and a story that remains with you.

Dinner Party: A Tragedy - Sarah Gilmartin

As you might expect from its title, this novel opens with a dinner party. It’s Dublin, 2018, and an important night for the characters gathered around the table. There’s siblings Peter, Ray and Kate, as well as Ray’s wife Liz. The dinner is to mark the 16th anniversary of the death of Kate’s twin, Elaine, a tragedy that has irreversibly shaped this family.

The story slips between this present and the past, showing how despite leaving its physical space, the dynamics and effects of her family home still ripple out to affect Kate, years later. Critical to this family structure is the figure of Mammy, and Gilmartin’s exploration of the complicated and damaging relationship between mother and children is particularly powerful. She shows all the unspoken, automatic ways Kate tries to make herself small and easy, to fit in and not leave a trace. And how she looks for control elsewhere, seeks to restrict and prohibit, to enforce her own rules over her life and her body after so many years of being unable, of always being thought of in relation to someone else.

It’s a quietly tense novel, moving in its depiction of Kate’s inner life and her loneliness. The familial relationships it explores are complicated and believable - who are you without the people who made you, and how have those bonds harmed you? I really enjoyed it, and am surprised more people aren’t speaking about this book.

Exciting Times - Naoise Dolan

21 year old Ava has left Ireland to teach English in Hong Kong. Here, she meets Julian - an Eton educated banker who is the opposite of her in so may ways, but to whom she still feels a pull. Ava moves into Julian’s apartment, meets his father and a confusing ‘non-relationship’ starts between the pair. This is until Ava meets Edith, a straight forward and confident lawyer who adds both a sense of relief and complication to Ava’s feelings.

Blunt and taut and observant and witty, Exciting Times is incredibly readable - exploring power and intimacy in relationships, the struggle in trying to understand someone whilst failing to understand yourself. I found Dolan’s exploration of language particularly fascinating, how the rules around words and dialects are often no clearer than the rules of attraction. Communication, and being unable to say what you mean, or interpret the other’s actions, are at the heart of the relationships depicted in the book. Dolan also draws interesting colonial comparisons between Ireland and Hong Kong - connecting these two spaces that at first may seem wildly different, but, just like Julian and Ava, contain hidden similarities.

Woman, Eating - Claire Kohda

Woman, Eating is a vampire story - Lydia and her mother have survived on a diet of pig’s blood from the butcher’s for as long as she can remember. However, after her mother becomes ill, Lydia leaves her in Margate and moves to London. Renting a warehouse studio and working an internship at a nearby gallery, she is alone for the first time - and ravenous.

Food, and being hungry for what you can’t have are critical parts of this novel. Lydia’s parents are Japanese and Malaysian, and she attempts to understand these parts of her identity through the food she is unable to eat, watching cooking videos on Youtube and dreaming of the dishes she would make for herself.

I was really excited for this book - it seemed like an intersection of ideas and topics I look for in my reading - food and identity, all with some vampires to tie it back to my Twilight days. I felt it really could have been pushed further though - there were multiple plot points and ideas that I wanted Kohda to explore more, other avenues I wanted her to take us down.

Other People’s Clothes - Calla Henkel

As a location associated with parties and underground clubs, Berlin is a city that often gets mythologised. And at its core, Other People’s Clothes is a book about stories - about how we control our own narrative, about the lies other people tell us and how fact and fiction can so easily become blurred.

Berlin is a key part of this tale - Zoe and Hailey are student artists, have arrived in the city for a year - partly to escape, partly to discover some fresh new side of themselves. They rent an apartment from the strange Beatrice, a prolific author who seems to have more sinister intentions - to observe the girls from inside the walls, and use them as inspiration for her new book.

When they realise that they are being watched, Zoe and Hailey attempt to write this story themselves, planning the plot points before Beatrice is able to, and embarking on a journey that has a catastrophic end. Perfectly paced, this is a blur of dark clubs, drugs, sex and murder. It’s a great thriller, carrying those beautiful jolts of genuine fear.

The Service - Frankie Miren

Lori, Freya and Paula offer the three overlapping perspectives that make up The Service. Lori and Freya are both sex workers: Lori working from a rented flat to support her daughter; Freya escorting to make money whilst she’s a student. Paula is a journalist who has dedicated her career to campaigning against prostitution. As police raids increase across the city, and the laws around sex work begin to change, the stories of these three women becomes more and more entangled - a empathetic story of privilege, power, and all the different factors at play in discussions of de-criminalisation.

As with Woman, Eating, I felt there were ways this book could have been pushed further and aspects to the characters I wanted to see more of. It does however, open a door on sex work - something I didn’t know much about before - aiming to provide space for a whole host of voices and opinions.

Animal - Lisa Taddeo

After the married man she was seeing kills himself in front of her in a busy New York restaurant, Joan leaves the city and drives to LA. She is here in an attempt to understand the past - a dark quest to find Alice, a woman to whom she is irrevocably linked. Visceral and violently sexual, this book is a tough read at times, and Taddeo aims to make you squirm.

Joan is deeply flawed, painfully destructive and carrying a crippling history of trauma. And this is not a world that is kind to women - sexual violence pervades and seeps into every space and interaction. Joan has learned how to use people, particularly men, to get what she wants, but even her cruelty often feels insufficient compared to the constant trauma she has to wade through.

I did really enjoy this book, and in particular its discussion of gender, and the relationships between men and women, but it is not an easy read. Heavy and spiralling, its characters contain dark and perverse corners - a complex story of power and the ways it is frequently abused.