Stuart Evers | The Spectator columnists & writers

Wall Street madness: Trust, by Hernan Diaz, reviewed

‘I don’t trust fiction,’ the famous author told me, both of us several glasses to the good. ‘It contains too much truth.’ I nodded and she laughed and we drank more wine, but that sentence stayed with me in all its aphoristic glory. When she died, this was the first thing I remembered: our conspiratorial conversation in the deepest dark of 1990s Soho. This is not true. It has the feel of lived experience, yet it is entirely invented. The context, its placement and the fact that it is printed in a magazine gives it credence. As readers, we do not expect to be lied to. With a work of fiction, the opposite is true. Lies are all we can hope for. Hernan Diaz’s excellent second novel Trust asks which lies are more compelling: the ones we tell ourselves or the ones the world throws our way? Trust opens with a novella called ‘Bonds’ (a title that also has a financial double-entendre), allegedly written by one Harold Vanner: a breathtaking account of Wall Street trader Benjamin Rask’s rise and rise, and that of his wife Helen.

A twist on the American classic: The Sidekick, by Benjamin Markovits, reviewed

On the cover of The Sidekick, just below a broken basketball hoop, a quote from Jonathan Lethem suggests Benjamin Markovits is a ‘classic American voice’. Open the book and the first sentence – ‘I was a big slow fat kid but one thing I could do was shoot free throws’ – confirms the kind of American classicism we can expect: Salinger-conversational, Updike-melancholic, Roth-confessional. Male and white, in short. A decade ago, when The Sidekick is largely set, this would be hardly worth mentioning, but for a new novel to stand on such patriarchal shoulders now feels curiously old-fashioned. And while Markovits strives for something more contemporary, it is that voice – of Brian Blum, a sportswriter – that is the novel’s principal strength, but also its weakness.

Unkindly light: The Morning Star, by Karl Ove Knausgaard, reviewed

Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle sequence is one of this century’s great projects: an intimate epic in which the overriding obsessions of our times — identity, gender, the meaning of truth — play out through six maddeningly detailed, curiously compelling autofictions. It’s the kind of work that casts a long shadow; any fiction that follows, the author knows, is in communion, and competition, with that momentous work. Which is why The Morning Star, Knausgaard’s return to the novel after an almost decade-long break, is both fascinating and frustrating. With its biblical allusion title and occult MacGuffin (a new star has mysteriously appeared in the night sky over Norway), the book suggests Knausgaard has returned to his interest in divinity, one he explored in his second novel, A Time to Every Purpose Under Heaven.

Unexpectedly delicious

‘Food experiences,’ writes Michael Flanagan in his paper ‘Cowpie, Gruel and Midnight Feasts: Food in Popular Children’s Literature’, ‘form part of the daily texture of every child’s life… thus it is hardly surprising that food is a constantly recurring motif in literature written for children.’ Though Helen Oyeyemi’s sixth novel, Gingerbread, is far from a novel for children, it is steeped in the tradition of the Brothers Grimm, Roald Dahl, L. Frank Baum, even Lemony Snicket. But this being the work of Oyeyemi, these initial influences are soon turned inside out, reimagined and repurposed by one of our most singular and inventive contemporary voices. The great joy of Oyeyemi’s work is its sense of complete freedom: in her narratives, we rarely, if ever, end up in expected places.

Closure at last

And so it comes, the final volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle sequence: a pale brick of a book, one that might be The End, but is an undertaking all of itself. The previous five books — autofictions that catalogue one’s man’s life in exacting, almost terrifyingly detail — were far from slender, but The End is nearly 1,200 pages, and as such presents itself almost as a challenge, or a dare. Are you sure you want to do this? Can you really face a further delve into the painstaking minutiae of Knausgaard’s thoughts and actions? These are questions that recur as you read, the answers often changing in the turn of a page. As with A Man in Love, the second — and probably the finest — volume, Knausgaard narrates from a conspicuous present, looking back on past deeds, consumed by the brickbats and tensions of daily life.

Shadows of the past

The Shangri-Las’ song ‘Past, Present and Future’ divides a life into three, Beethoven-underpinned phases: before, during and after. Each section turns in on the next, binding them together with devastating effect. It is one of the oddest and most radically structured moments in pop, and one that came to mind when reading these three very different debut novels. With similar temporal concerns to the Lieber-Butler-Morton lyric, each traces the implications of past action on the present —and how these in turn could shape the coming years. The future is most notably explored in Danny Denton’s brilliantly conceived The Earlie King & the Kid in Yellow, a polyphonic trawl through the murky waters of a permanently raining Irish dystopia.

Worming out the truth

In Delmore Schwartz’s story ‘In Dreams Begin Responsibilities’, a young man dreams he is watching his father and mother’s engagement onscreen from a seat in a cinema. Weeping at the certain knowledge of the pain to come, he’s patted on the back by a woman. ‘There, there,’ she says, ‘all of this is just a movie.’ In a way, this moment distils the challenge of all oneiric narratives — it’s a fiction within a fiction, one in which anything can happen, but without real-world consequences. In this dark, brilliantly controlled debut, the Argentinian Samanta Schweblin uses the fabric of a dream to weave a novel in which everything is at stake and at risk: identity, love and existence. ‘They’re like worms’, a boy says to a woman, Amanda, who is lying in a hospital ward, probably about to die.

Smoke and mirrors | 6 October 2016

Nell Zink’s route to publication became something of a story in itself: one that involved an email exchange about birds with Jonathan Franzen, which led to Franzen’s subsequently championing her work, and ended with not one but two novels — Mislaid and The Wallcreeper — published together in a lavish, design-savvy edition. But it was Zink’s style and ideas that drew fervid, hyperbolic praise. Fresh and undeniably original, this is fiction at odds with much of American literary convention, Zink’s prose refusing to conform to received ideas of how novels are constructed; time shifts, perspective changes and characterisation, for example, are all treated casually, almost with disdain. The word ‘genius’ was bandied around.

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