Recent first novels
Rosalind Porter
In 1991, A.S. Byatt wrote an introduction to a reissue of her first novel, The Shadow of the Sun (1964), in which she recalls that she had: the eternal first novelist’s problem ... I
didn’t want to write a ‘me-novel’ [but] I didn’t know anything — about life, at least.
Highly autobiographical first novels are still out of fashion and even budding writers are expected to cast their eye away from themselves. And yet in our culture of instant gratification and celebrity, a writer’s reputation can depend almost exclusively on the critical reception of a first novel. The eternal problem today, it seems, is twofold: we expect first novels to be works of non-autobiographical genius well before a writer has had time to mature.
Cultivating one’s skills in other genres is a good way to learn how to write a ‘nonme’ first novel, which is precisely what three formidable American writers have done. Dan Chaon’s brilliant 2001 shortstory collection, Among the Missing, was easily the best book to cross my path that year. With its focus on the complexities of family life, Chaon’s stories showcased the way random acts of violence affect everyday domesticity. His first novel, You Remind Me of Me (John Murray, £10.99, pp. 368, ISBN 0719565405), shines a spotlight on hardworking, slightly marginalised Americans (the type who eat a lot of breakfast cereal), and revisits the intricacies of family structures and the terrain of inexplicable violence to weave an elongated narrative about two estranged halfbrothers.
When Jonah is six, the gentle family dog unexpectedly attacks and deforms him. Years later, after his mother has committed suicide, Jonah goes off in search of his half-brother Troy, who was put up for adoption at birth. Troy is an archetypal Chaon character: a decent, working-class Nebraskan on parole for a minor drug offence and struggling to regain custody of his young son, Loomis. Desperate for a sense of his own purpose, Jonah attempts to forge a brotherly relationship with Troy with dire consequences.
Populated with weirdly intense, all-seeing children, make-shift families and alien ated bachelors, it’s a heartbreakingly beautiful look at the architecture of thwarted desire and the rampant destruction that minor incidents can wreak upon the seemingly most ordinary of lives.
A former playwright and the author of the highly acclaimed collection of short stories, I Am Not Jackson Pollock (2003), John Haskell’s experimental novel, American Purgatorio (Canongate, £12.99, pp. 256, ISBN 1841955973), is equally impressive. On his way to New Jersey with his wife Anne, a man stops at a petrol station and returns from the till to find his car and Anne gone. Having ruled out kidnapping and the more prosaic possibility that she has simply left him, our unnamed hero sets off across America in search of Anne, which evolves (with perfect pace) into the search for the self that has slowly disintegrated after the incomprehensible incident at the petrol station.
He meets people — many people — and has small interactions loaded with contingent meaning, as only a mind in the process of losing itself can attach to the exchanges of quotidian life. Gradually he goes mad (as one does in the face of inexplicability; as one would if one devoted all one’s time to thinking about the world we live in). But what’s most striking about this depiction of existential alienation is the incredible insight our hero is able to offer us, even in the face of his own mental breakdown. As he grows weirder and weirder, a certain clarity to his thoughts takes hold, and it feels refreshing to be presented with a character whose psychosis ends up resembling a kind of astuteness most of us can only hope to achieve.
The Contortionist’s Handbook (Fourth Estate, £10.99, pp. 208, ISBN 0007194161) by the journalist Craig Clevenger is the incredible execution of a bizarre narrative premise. John Dolan Vincent gets headaches that are so unusual they evade the expertise of the medical community. With no treatment, the only way Vincent can alleviate the pain is to bring himself to the brink of overdose, which then places him in the hands of hospital psychiatrists. To avoid incarceration, Vincent changes his identity each time he has successfully convinced the mental-health authorities that he isn’t suicidal, so that no record of any previous overdose exists.
We follow Vincent, a master plagiarist and professional liar with a photographic memory and a way with words, as he appropriates the lives of three different people until eventually his emotions catch up with him and he’s forced to face the challenges that love presents. Tender in its portrayal of the ethereal nature of identity and cinematic in its stylish critique of the American social services, The Contortionist’s Handbook is an entertaining and original thriller, which skilfully juggles the mass of detail essential to this most convoluted of plots.
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