Good evening!
A hectic week for me but I still managed to get a fair bit of reading in. On Wednesday I hosted the wonderful Sheena Patel at West Kirby Books to discuss her novel I’m a Fan, which facilitated loads of good conversations on access, influencing and Instagram staking. I’ll be hosting Aidan Cottrell-Boyce tomorrow, again at WKB, to discuss his debut novel The End of Nightwork — there are still a few tickets left so if you’re in the area, grab one by emailing hello@thewestkirbybookshop.com.
What I’ve been reading this week and what I think about it
Quite predictably, I have been reading The End of Nightwork,which came out last month with Granta. It’s so brilliant — at once very surreal while remaining familiar. The dialogue is really natural, and natural conversation is often quite odd when it’s transcribed, and I thought it captured that really well. It’s about a man who aged ten years when he was thirteen, so that he looked like a fully developed man in his 20s until he is in his early 30s and he ages again. Overall it’s a reflection on the differences between generations and how you get treated differently at different ages, with a lot of it addressed to his young son. It’s really moving in places, and also extremely funny. I’m looking forward to talking about it more tomorrow.
I was lucky enough to receive a proof of Max Porter’s new novel Shy, which is out in April with Faber. It’s about a teenager on the cusp of young adulthood in the 90s, called Shy. Shy struggles with his anger, which seems to show itself unpredictably when he feels overwhelmed with other feelings like shame, or nostalgia, or sadness. The lead quote sums up the feel of the book really well: ‘The night is huge and it hurts.’ This is very much about pain, and the feeling of being overwhelmed.
As ever with Porter, everything works really well, including the experimental typesetting and form. His novels Grief is the Thing with Feathers (2015) and Lanny (2019) were extremely visceral and affecting, but I actually felt like this one was the most immediately impactful out of all of them. I felt really uncomfortable while reading it, like it was a horrible dream that i wanted to get out of (dreams play a big part in it), but I think this was largely a good thing. Shy is a character who seems so hard to access in his violence and unpredictability, but reading about him gets under your skin. His shame conjures up your own versions and memories of shame so that you feel like you’re going through it all with him.
I started reading Sarah Schulman’s People in Trouble (1990) last night, and I’m quite enjoying it so far. It’s set during the AIDs crisis in New York City and I’m interested in where it’s going, especially in how it depicts women during the epidemic.
Books on my radar
Literally about an hour ago Melissa Broder, one of my fave novelists, announced her latest with be released in October. Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee