Review_FICTION
WWW.PUBLISHERSWEEKLY.COM 43Meena Kandasamy’s When I Hit You is a brutal,
essential narrative of marital abuse and survival
(reviewed on this page).After Me Comes the Flood
Sarah Perry. HarperCollins, $16.99 trade
paper (256p) ISBN 978-0-06-266640-6
In Melmoth author Perry’s eerie, peculiar
latest (first published in the U.K. in 2014),
an anxious London bookshop owner
assumes a new identity among a set of
mentally disturbed strangers. After feeling
oppressed by the summer heat, John Cole
closes up the shop and decides to visit his
brother in Norfolk. On the way, John gets
lost and suffers a panic attack, his car breaks
down, and then, following a path through
the forest, he discovers a house full of people
who claim they have been awaiting his
arrival. Initially unable to admit he’s not
the “Jon Coules” they’d been expecting,
he finds himself captivated by the group of
old friends—particularly Eve and Alex,
both in their 20s—who know each other
from their past stays at St. Jude’s psychiatric
ward. Hester, the mischievous, much older
ringleader, vows to help the others improve
themselves, while Alex, alarmed by anon-
ymous letters he’s received about a nearby
dam, takes dangerous nightly swims to
check for signs of impending floods. Over
the week spent at the house, John’s lust for
Eve grows and he settles into his borrowed
identity as Coules, and Perry teases out
questions of sanity, love, and faith. Though
the slow pace will test readers’ patience,
the novel succeeds in building a strange
world in the English woods. Perry’s fans
will want to take a look. Agent: Susan
Golomb, Writers House. (Mar.)
So We Can Glow
Leesa Cross-Smith. Grand Central, $27
(256p) ISBN 978-1-5387-1533-8
Cross-Smith’s rich collection (after
Whiskey & Ribbons) follows women
exploring desire, desperation, and despair.
The brief opener, “We, Moons,” an
explosion of slam cadence (“We’re okay, our
hearts, dusted with pink”), serves as a battle
hymn of self-determination and sisterhood
that thematically unites the subsequent
narratives. “Teenage Dream Time Machine”
unfolds as a texting conversation between
two mothers worried about their young,
wild daughters and remembering their own
impetuous youth. In “Pink Bubblegum and
Flowers,” a young woman crushes on one of
the men rebuilding the deck on her parents’
house and navigates a tense scene of toxic
masculinity. In “California, Keep Us,” a
Kentucky couple, mourning the loss of
their baby, retreats once a month for a
weekend in California to assume different
identities with one another and resolve
not to “talk about death.” The delightfully
idiosyncratic prose (“She felt guilty about
lusting over Clint. It was lazy, like cold
French fries”) distinguishes each of the
narrator’s points of view within common
themes of love, friendship, sex, and loyalty.
These stories showcase the wide range of
Cross-Smith’s talent. Agent: Kerry
D’Agostino, Curtis Brown. (Mar.)When I Hit You: Or, a Portrait of
the Writer as a Young Wife
Meena Kandasamy. Europa, $17 trade paper
(224p) ISBN 978-1-60945-599-6
Kandasamy’s stateside debut, a finalist
for the Women’s Prize for Fiction when it
was published in the U.K. in 2017, offers a
brutal, essential narrative of marital abuse
and survival. When the unnamed narrator,
a politically active Tamil woman living in
present-day southern India, meets her
eventual husband, a college lecturer and
former guerrilla fighter, she is initially
energized by his Marxist politics and
idealistic worldview. After the two marry,
the husband’s theorizing becomes invertedand dangerous, as he conjures up intellec-
tual justifications for enforcing extreme
social isolation on his wife, and repeatedly
beats and rapes her. Kandasamy’s novel
blends painfully raw scenes of physical
and sexual violence with the narrator’s
vibrant interiority, which includes musings
on India’s “bachelor politicians,” influen-
tial men who publicly reject marriage
and family in service of their country
while taking advantage of women, and
her growing realization that narrating her
own abuse may help her survive it. She also
powerfully addresses the inevitable ques-
tion of why women stay with their abusers.
The answer has to do with hope, and the
narrative of a short-lived but devastating
marriage is surprisingly hopeful as well.
This visceral and sophisticated account is
both terrifying and triumphant. (Mar.)★ Senseless Women
Sarah Harris Wallman, Univ. of Massachusetts,
$19.95 (208p) ISBN 978-1-62534-518-9
In Wallman’s bewitching and macabre
debut collection, women intent on
changing their realities contend with
violence and manipulation. In “The Dead
Girls Show,” overweight Carly attends a
showcase of undead girls and hopes to one
day look like the Arabella, “a starved
mermaid” in the “greeny spotlight” who
died from anorexia. After a reckless driver
outside the theater kills Carly, she is added
to the show, forever unable to escape her
body. In “One Car Hooks into the Next
and Pulls,” a woman meets a married man
on a sentient commuter train, which
appreciates her initial resistance to the
man’s charms (“The train realized she had
only pretended sleep. This delighted the
train”). After the woman agrees to begin
an affair, the disapproving train causes a
deadly accident. In wry, spare prose, the
title story follows an unnamed woman
living in a long-term care hospital after
surviving a poisoning. Miriam, her nurse,
becomes enraptured by the woman’s
story of an ill-fated love affair with her
brother-in-law, believing that the
woman was poisoned by her family. After
Miriam catches a doctor molesting the
defenseless patient, she takes on the role
of her protector. Wallman’s incisive
writing and bold choices make this
memorable and worthwhile. (Mar.)Fiction
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