Financial Times Europe - 02.11.2019 - 03.11.2019

2 November/3 November 2019 ★ FT Weekend 11

Cal. Markovits shows the ripple effect

that a break-up has on other relation-

ships, as family members feel their loy-

alty to Paul challenged by their symp-

athy towards Dana.

A Weekend in New York xplored mul-e

tiple characters’ perspectives but it was

ultimately Paul’s novel, in part because

the reader rooted for him on the court.

Its sequel is a broader family portrait.

Bill, the patriarch, spends most of it

in upstate New York at his ailing sister’s

hospital bedside, re-immersed in his

Jewish roots while his wife, children

and grandchildren celebrate Christmas

in Texas. The elder daughter Susie is

moving to Oxford with her English hus-

band but their marriage is wobbly,

while Nathan, the oldest brother, has a

potentially life-threatening illness and

faces moral dilemmas in his legal

career. Jean, the youngest of the sib-

lings, is living with an older man who’s

left his wife and children.

The novel dramatises the chaos and

claustrophobia ofprolonged family

gatherings where, as Paul puts it, “You

never have the conversations you want

to have... Something always comes up,

other people get in the way.” The reader

is like a peripheral guest, taking sides in

squabbles and feeling frustrated at how

Books

I

n Ben Lerner’s third novel,The

Topeka School, we encounter Adam

Gordon, a budding poet and crack

competitive debater in his final

year at high school in Kansas,

where his parents are psychologists at

“the Foundation”.

It is 1997, and Adam’s mother Jane is

the author of a best-selling book that

brings her the unwelcome attention of

the Christian fundamentalists of the

Westboro Baptist Church, as well as

threatening phone calls from the kind of

men who today would be misogynistic

internet trolls.

His quieter, ostensibly less accom-

plished father Jonathan works at the

Foundation with troubled young men

he calls the “lost Boys”. These include

Darren Eberheart, an elementary

school friend of Adam’s who, by late

adolescence, smoulders in inarticulate

and solitary rage on the outer limits of

his social circle.

Some readers will recognise Adam as

the narrator of Lerner’s first novel,Leav-

ing the Atocha Station 2011). As in that(

book — and indeed in his second novel

10:04 2014), which is narrated by a(

writer named Ben who, like Lerner, lives

in Brooklyn and writes poetry as well as

fiction — here he combines the autofic-

tional (Lerner’s parents werepsycholo-

gists at the Menningerclinic in Topeka,

where he grew up) and the metafic-

tional with exceptional dexterity.

In the earlier book, the 24-year-old

Adam is consumed by doubts about the

authenticity of his vocation as a poet (“I

tended to find lines of poetry beautiful

only when I encountered them quoted

in prose”) and about the ability of liter-

ary language to catch reality in its net.

At one point here, Lerner puts a simi-

lar kind of self-interrogation in the

words not of the adolescent Adam but in

those of his father, who recalls that

when he would read a book in graduate

school, he would be “acutely aware of

other people watching me, of how I per-

formed absorption, which of course dis-

tracted me from the page”.

But unlike its predecessors, which

were both narrated in the first

person,The Topeka School ccupies mul-o

tiple points of view: Adam’s, Jane’s,

Jonathan’s and Darren’s. This gives it an

expansiveness that, for all their quali-

ties, the earlier books lacked.

The Topeka School s ai Bildungsroman,

therefore, a portrait of the poet as a

young man — albeit one couched in an

idiom that is distinctively Lerner’s. So

alongside an exploration of fraught fam-

ily dynamics (for which the setting in

the Foundation provides a rich psycho-

therapeutic framework), there are set

pieces that allow the author to explore

what he recently described in an inter-

view with the New Yorker as “litera-

ture’s ability or inability to capture...

barely perceptible sensations that can

be difficult to verbalise”.

Early in the novel Adam wonders if

other people see the phosphenes, or

retinal charges, he sees when he closes

his eyes. Are these patterns unique to

him or are they universal? He presses

his thumb against his girlfriend’s closed

eyelids and asks if she perceives the

same red sparks that he does.

Adam’s preoccupation with the lin-

guistic dimension of the problem of

other minds, the recognition that lan-

guage is the “fundamental medium of

sociality”, is an enduring motif of the

novel. Much later, he visits his grandfa-

ther in a nursing home. The old man is

nearly mute, capable only of emitting

occasional noises that, Adam thinks,

“might have been attempts at pho-

nemes, at sense, at language. Little lin-

guistic phosphenes.”

When they leave the nursing home he

asks his mother whether she thinks his

grandfather can listen but not respond.

She says she does. “That seems like the

worst to me,” Adam says. “A nightmare.

Not being able to talk back.”

Being able to talk back, of course, is

the key to Adam’s success as a competi-

tive debater. It is also the source of his

standing in the Hobbesian hierarchy of

high school.

Adam’s prowess at “freestyling” earns

him an entrée to circles from which

he, a prizewinner with a growing love

of poetry, might otherwise have

been barred. Most children have to

learn to “pass” at school, but he is

particularly adept at navigating the

distance that separates the hyper-

articulacy of talk around the dinner

table at home from the Midwestern

simulacrum of hip-hop at school.

Darren’s social failures, by contrast,

are rooted in a “deep incomprehension

of the language game in which he was

attempting to feign fluency” — in this

instance, tough-guy trash-talking that

mimics the cadences of gangsta rap. His

terminal inability to properly master

the codes is exemplified when he insists

on accessorising the baggy black jeans

favoured by his peers with an incongru-

ous beige belt.

It falls to Adam’s mother to worry

about the downsides of her son’s way

with words, about what one might call

the politics of speech, which turns out to

be one of the major preoccupations of

the novel. At a family meal, Jane winces

at the way her son constantly talks over

his girlfriend. She tries to rationalise his

behaviour — to think of “my bully of a

son as a vulnerable young man passing

through a complicated social and hor-

monal stage” — but can’t help also

thinking of the anonymous men who

want to silenceher.

And watching Adam debate she is

“both fascinated and unnerved”. His

speech coach advises him to “interrupt

[his] highbrow fluency with bland

soundbites of regional decency”. But

Jane clings to a fantasy of that fluency

“eventually being harnessed for impor-

tant social work”.

Lerner, I think, wants us to see that

this fantasy is not only Jane’s, but also

that of a certain idea of America itself.

Rhyme and reason

The narrator of ‘Leaving the Atocha Station’ returns as a yperarticulateh

schoolboy in a novel with multiple points of view.ByJonathan Derbyshire

Cat O’Neil

Siblings gone south

Max Liu onan absorbing

portrait of the tensions, chaos

and cabin fever of a prolonged

family gathering in Texas

F

ifty or so pages intoChristmas

in Austin —the second novel in

what Benjamin Markovits’s

publisher is calling his “family

saga” — I was feeling worried.

Last year’sA Weekend in New York asw

hardly plot-driven, but its tennis player

protagonist Paul Essinger’s prepar-

ations for the final US Open of his career

created suspense, and its structure was

as taut as the strings on his rackets. By

contrast, the beginning of the new book

features a lot of downtime.

Still, I needn’t have worried. The

drama ratchets up as the Essinger sib-

lings arrive at their family home in Aus-

tin, Texas, for a seasonal gathering. As

the novel continues, “the presence of

accumulated life”, as one character puts

it, proves utterly absorbing.

It picks up with the Essingers about a

year and a half after the ending ofA

Weekend in New York. Thirty-five-year-

old Paul has begun his long retirement

by walking out on his partner Dana and

their toddler Cal and moving from New

York to Austin, where he grew up and

where his parents, Bill and Liesel, still

live. “There’s got to be a kind of life pos-

sible that would seem to him worth liv-

ing,” writes Markovits, in an early

example of the free indirect style used to

convey the characters’ thoughts.

The other three Essinger siblings,

their partners and children all descend

on Austin for Christmas, as do Dana and

Exquisite

Cadavers

by Meena

Kandasamy

Atlantic £5.99

112 pages

Being able to talk back is

the key to Adam’s success as

a debater and the source of

his social standing at school

long it takes for the group to make plans.

Whenever somebody suggested an

afternoon stroll, or going to a bar for a

margarita after dinner, I was ushering

them out the door, so acutely did I sense

their cabin fever.

Susie, a lapsed academic, envisages

writing a book about “the idea of family

as anescapefrom history, or an insul-

ation from it, from political forces and

social pressures and cultural shifts”.

At first glance, this could be Marko-

vits’s project too — but even though the

Essingers are heterosexual, well-off and

white, social forces shape their lives,

with Nathan and Jean arguing about

politics, everybody observing Austin’s

transition into a hipster colony and the

scars of southern racial oppression visi-

ble to those who are looking. When

Nathan’s daughter learns about a black

man who worked for the house’s previ-

ous owner and lived in a garden shed,

the novel hints at the kind of territory

Markovits explored inYou Don’t Have to

Live Like This 2015) — one of this dec-(

ade’s subtler fictionalexplorations of

race, class and gentrification.

Markovits has been open about the

autobiographical elements to the Ess-

inger books (he was raised in Austin by

a German mother and American father,

and has siblings in Ivy League

academia), and yet he presents his char-

acters with a degree of objectivity that

lets the reader decide where their sym-

pathies lie. Early in his career, Marko-

vits published a trilogy of novels about

Lord Byron, but I sense that the Essing-

ers’ story could run to more than three

books. At least I hope so, because I’m

already missing them, looking forward

to the next instalment and wishing I

were going to Austin this Christmas.

of the LAPD when a stolen “murder

book” surfaces, detailing the death of an

ex-con decades ago. Also reappearing is

Connelly’s low-rent lawyer (and Bosch’s

half-brother) Mickey Haller. All three

are soon obliged to tread painfully on

police toes before it is revealed why the

murder book was stolen years before.

Juggling a characteristically crowded

storyline (halfway through the book,

Bosch is coping with five investigative

tracks), Connelly demonstrates once

again why he is held in such esteem.

If you’re the UK’s foremost writer of

classic ghost stories, why bother to ven-

ture into the overcrowded field of the

police procedural? Thankfully, Susan

Hill did just that with her novels featur-

ing saturnine copper Simon Serrailler,

of whichThe Benefit of Hindsight

(Chatto & Windus £18.99) is the latest —

and it’squite a return to form after last

year’s quotidianTheComfortsofHome.

Serrailler, coping with the loss of his

arm, has returned to police work at

Lafferton CID. He finds solace in making

drawings in the vaulted roof of the local

cathedral, but when a gay couple are

robbed by initially friendly young

motorists, Serrailler deduces that there

may be an organised crime strategy in

play. A press blackout that he orders has

unexpected consequences — a mistake

that could have benefited from the titu-

lar benefit of hindsight. Readers of Hill/

Serrailler will be used to the fact that she

crams her narratives with a host of per-

sonal character detail — very much the

case here.

American writer Rene Denfeld’sThe

Butterfly Girl Weidenfeld £14.99) is a(

follow-up to the excellentThe Child

Finder, with thirtysomething private eye

Naomi Cottle continuing to look for the

sister she has not seen since they were

both abducted as children. At the same

time, Naomi is dealing with 12-year-old

Celia (who has suffered sexual abuse at

the hands of her stepfather), and finds

herself investigating the murder of

street children. Denfeld expertly evokes

the lives of the vulnerable in society.

Antti Tuomainen’sLittle Siberia

(Orenda £8.99, translated by David

Hackston) is already a considerable suc-

cess in the author’s native Finland. A

priest called Joel is protecting a valuable

meteorite while trying to come to terms

with the pregnancy of his wife (the child

may not be his); violence erupts. By no

means Nordic noir of the familiar vari-

ety, this is eccentric, humorous fare,

reminiscent of nothing so much as a

Coen Brothers movie.

Finally, three expertly turned novels

from three reliable talents.The Shape of

Nightby Tess Gerritsen (Bantam £20)

has its troubled food writer heroine dis-

covering that she is not alone in an iso-

lated house on a hill; it’s a clever con-

temporary spin on the Gothic novel.

And bothNow You See Them y Ellyb

Griffiths (Quercus £14.99) andBryant

and May: England’s Finest y Christo-b

pher Fowler (Doubleday £16.99) are

infused with a rich and beguilingly

eccentric Englishness, full of character

and an idiosyncratic sense of place.

BarryForshaw’slatestbookis

‘CrimeFiction:AReader’sGuide’

Daggers come out

T

he film industry has the

Oscars; the world of crime

fiction has the Crime Writ-

ers’ Association Daggers —

and the imprimatur of the

latter can produce quite as much of a

sales fillip as those gold statuettes. At

this year’s awards dinner (which I have

beenMC-ing for years), those carrying

home the big baubles included MW

Craven forThe Puppet Show nd Dova

Alfon forA Long Night in Paris, and the

evening was a reminder of what a vin-

tage year it has been for the genre. How

many of the following will be up for

next year’s awards?

After several successful standalones,

the writing team who make up “Nicci

French” — Nicci Gerrard and Sean

French — inaugurated a new series with

a recurring character, a psychotherapist

called Frieda Klein. I was among the

admirers who lamented this publishing

imperative and were wistful for the days

of a new protagonist for each new Nicci

French novel — often a woman making

catastrophic mistakes that plunge her

life into chaos.

Well, we can rejoice — withThe Lying

Room Simon & Schuster £14.99), Nicci(

French is back to what she does best:

dispensing trenchant psychological sus-

pense in a one-off format, in which the

fate of the central character is up for

grabs. Neve Connolly dresses in sexy

underwear for an assignation with her

lover. But on arriving at his flat, she

finds him with his head staved in, a

bloody hammer nearby. Instead of

phoning the police (terrified of how rev-

elation of her affair will hit her family),

she cleans the death scene, removing

not only traces of herself (she thinks)

but of whoever committed the murder.

It’s an ill-advised action, but this is,

after all, a Nicci French heroine. She

is soon engulfed in a maelstrom of lies

and betrayal. Neve is a wonderfully

conflicted heroine with whom it’s easy

to identify. Readers will find themselves

manipulated in the most pleasurable

of fashions.

In a world in which absolute values

are increasingly amorphous, it’s com-

forting to be able to say that some things

are just the very best. Such as the work

of Michael Connelly, whoseThe Night

Fire Orion £20) is further proof of his(

undimmed creativity.

Old and new Connelly protagonists

interact here: Detective Harry Bosch is

drawn out of uneasy retirement into

another teaming-up with Renée Ballard

By Barry Forshaw

GENRE ROUND-UP

CRIME FICTION

couple,” she first writes in the margin.

Once she yields, this decision is injected

into the narrative: Maya becomes

mixed-race. (To cause tension, it’s

imperceptible, enough that Maya recog-

nises racist undertones directed towards

Karim but not her, that she can whizz

through border control but has to wait

for him.) When Kandasamy finds ithard

to empathise with Maya, she makes her

pregnant. (At the time of writing, Kan-

dasamy was too: “In the short term, my

concerns become her concerns.”) When

reality and fiction overlap, she tells us so.

Exquisite Cadavers s deeply lyrical,i

with space given for thoughts to build.

Written in the omniscient third person,

the main narrative flips between Maya

and Karim’s perspective. Kandasamy

zooms in, focusing on their dynamic

rather than action. Karim is too fixed,

Maya too malleable. Film tropes recur:

Karim seeing through a filmic lens,

Maya judging her life through films.

With the writer present on the page,

every choice feels driven. The result is

an exploration of how discrimination

can pull and pick at intimacy. Kan-

dasamy’s presence only enhances the

fiction; her sense of life and art intro-

ducing a never-ending conversation

between writer, text and reader.

Read between the lines

A bold foray into metafiction

explores the lives of a married

couple and delivers brilliance,

writesRebecca Watson

E

xquisite Cadavers started,

Meena Kandasamy writes in

its preface, as “a reaction to

the reception of my second

novel”. Shortlisted for the

2018 Women’s Prize, hen I Hit You: Or,W

A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife

plays defiantly with form and voice.

The novel drew on experience, and this

overlap, she writes, was used by some

critics as reason to call it “memoir”. Its

intended genre was disregarded. By

doing so, they were “sidestepping the

entire artistic edifice”.

InExquisite Cadavers, Kandasamy

locates herself on the page — literally

taking to the margins. Every page is

indented, a line drawn, leaving space on

the outer side for Kandasamy to write

in smaller font. Here, she writesas

writer,interacting with the text and the

reader as the story progresses. She

begins an experiment to document the

collision of fact and fiction.

The novel follows a couple: Maya,

who works for a newspaper, and Karim,

an aspiring Tunisian film-maker, pres-

sured nto making something about hisi

heritage. Their marriage is steeped in

tension,exacerbated by insecurities.

This is what their dynamic becomes,

anyway — but these are decisions Kan-

dasamy makes, often live for the reader

in her designated margin. “I resist, and

then yield, to the urge to reflect on the

interracial nature of the [... ] fictional

The reader must make a choice about

how to readExquisite Cadavers —but it

isn’t difficult. There is a natural step-

back, step-forward between the two

sides of the page, like letting yourself be

moved by waves. The margins aren’t

pedantic, but powerful ruminations on

Kandasamy’s role as artist, and the news

and research that dominate her mind as

she writes. At one point, her column in

the margin is taken up by search results;

at another, it is a list of atrocities.

Sometimes the two trails are separate,

sometimes what seems distinct is

nudged askew: rain in the fictional

world provokes a real memory that ends

with rain; the dangers of the UK govern-

ment’s Prevent programme set alight

the fiction, then spread to Kandasamy’s

margin. Sometimes, the author quiet-

ens. “I am good with creating fictional

fathers,” she writes, her own father too

difficult to pen in English.Maya and

Karim’s conversation about parental

conflict continues alone.

Exquisite Cadavers’ experiment deliv-

ers a book that is slyly funny and pro-

foundly thoughtful. It is common

for critics and readers to belittle women

by assuming they write out of catharsis

rather than to create.Exquisite Cadavers

is not just a fierce rebuttal.It’s a work

of brilliance.

The reviewer’s debut novel, ‘little scratch’,

is published by Faber & Faber next year

Christmas

in Austin

by Benjamin

Markovits

Faber £16.99

432 pages

The Topeka School

by Ben Lerner

Granta £16.99/Farrar, Straus and

Giroux $27, 304 pages

With the author present

on the page, the result is

a conversation between

writer, text and reader

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