Her use for the novel, it seems, is its formal compatibility with the human relationships which, for Rooney, seem to be the only reason for living. In one particularly dark moment, Peter considers ‘[t]he final permanent nothing that is the only truth.’ Against the vastness and totality of this void, the task remains — for life and literature — the same: to seek out, cling to, and create meaning enough to go on living and to go on being moral. The everydayness of both love and the novel might seem unworthy of such high stakes — both seem, in Peter’s words, to be ‘experiment[s] bound almost certainly for one kind of failure or another.’ But Rooney is, as ever, interested also in how small daily miracles make this life seem more bearable than is proportionate. [read full essay]
Unknowability is perhaps the great theme of Greenwell’s novels so far: ‘we can never be sure of what we want,’ as the narrator puts it in Cleanness (2020). If there is a single writerly technique that defines all three books, it’s locating with surgical precision the moments where a person reveals some new part of themselves. This motif appears most strikingly in What Belongs To You (2016), when the narrator rejects his lover, Mitko, who responds with the threat of danger: ‘he wore a face I hadn’t seen before. . . I wondered whether it was a face he had just discovered or one he had hidden all along.’ But it’s in sickness that this inscrutability, this division, finds its truest form. [read full essay]
Almost the sole focus of writing about psychotropic intoxicants in the present generation is the therapeutic uses to which they might be put: to alleviate anxiety, depression, the more severe symptoms of Parkinson's disease, post-traumatic stress, addictive behaviours, Tourette's, just about anything. Microdosing LSD has evidently brought a sense of human perspective to the android labour in Silicon Valley. We would all be better off, it seems, if we were a degree or two further along the spectrum from the zero point of cold, raw sobriety. We wouldn't need to drink as much. Other people would seem nicer. [read full essay]
Declan Ryan's first poetry collection, Crisis Actor, came out in 2023. His poems are preoccupied with, and driven by, the weight and difficulty of expectation — of ourselves and of others. Ryan draws out the fear beneath expectation and ambition — the terror of stalling or self-thwarting — as he sketches the lives of marginal figures and underdogs who fail to finesse the systems in which they find themselves. Ryan writes these vignettes compassionately but unsentimentally — ‘You have a duty’, he says during our conversation, ‘to not run open-mouthed towards everything’ — and the result is a collection of poems both soft and hard. [read full interview]
Glad to the Brink of Fear: A Portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson is, before anything else, a personal text. That is a difficult distinction, generally, especially when addressing Emerson, and even more so when discussing a biography about him. ‘All history becomes subjective,’ he writes in ‘History,’ ‘in other words there is properly no history, only biography.’ What has passed before our time remains a dead text without translation. It is only at the point of contact — at the moment of subjectivity — that history can be said to exist at all. When Emerson says biography he of course means the life we have now, as it grows and will be read in another present. [read full essay]
Perhaps the reason my stories are often only brief glimpses of my characters’ lives is because this is my reality as a postal worker. I’m constantly on the move so my surroundings are always in flux. Sometimes I’ll witness the beginning of would could be a fascinating story, but I’ll never see the ending. Sometimes a customer will let me into their lives: we’ll just be passing the time on the doorstep, there’ll be a bit of a connection, they’ll confide in me and I’ll never see them again. [read full interview]
All this tonal detachment can seem aloof, and these days people have plenty to say — often imprecisely — about the aloofness of novels narrated and written by women. It‘s true that much contemporary fiction adopts a distant, drifting first-person perspective, the kind of stance which has often suited the short story in various traditions, but now proliferates in the novel. Precarity makes young adults like Erin and Magee’s Sean into outsiders, but the drifting perspective might also have technological roots. We live most of the time in two places, in the world and on our phones; phones have shaped for us the default mode of knee-jerk, superficial interpretation of other people. [read full essay]
The books of the year list can only ever be a provisional stock-taking: lags in publication preclude a complete picture. This year’s selections are a case in point: a narrow majority first appeared before 2023. Three of these are new translations. Another, Michael Winkler’s outlandish cult favourite Grimmish, finally reached the UK after an extraordinary two-year trajectory: self-published in his native Australia after universal rejection, the book became an improbable award and word-of-mouth success. Among the 2023 bona fides, there is significant range — including Saskia Hamilton’s posthumous poetry collection, the (possibly) final instalment of Adam Mars-Jones’s John Cromer series and Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting, a sensation that attracted a considerable hive. [read full essay]
Lynne Tillman’s latest book, Mothercare, is a call to examine the deep complexities that caring in all its forms — medical, social, private, domiciliary, familial — involves. It is a plea to look directly at the suffering of all who are part of this cared-for-carer relationship: the ill or disabled individual, the family, the precariously placed private caregivers and companions, the doctors and nurses, the surrounding friends. And it is an honest exposition and exploration of how racialised, gendered and classed the labour of care-work is and continues to be. [read full essay]
Reading Murray’s latest, The Bee Sting, put me in mind of Tolstoy’s line about how all happy families are alike, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. It follows Dickie and Imelda Barnes, who are bound together by a tragic death that changed the course of their lives two decades ago, as they struggle to keep their family together. To make matters worse, their two kids, Cass and PJ, are hatching plans to leave home, and Dickie’s car dealership is on the brink of collapse. The Bee Sting is a novel about family, secrets, love, and the lengths to which we’ll go, for better or worse, to protect the ones we love from the truth. It is, above all, a novel about the past and our inability to ever outrun it. [read full interview]