Author: Nina (Page 15 of 64)

How to end such a story, especially one that is this angry, like a big black fist? The voice is off-putting. All the important action happens offscreen; we don’t even see the shooting or the actual bodies or the video. Like that one guy in fiction workshop said, meta is so eighties. The mise en abyme is cool but overdone. This is a story of fragments, sketches. Dear author: thank you for sharing this, but we regret.

And what a brilliant story it is, this first, titular entry in the table of contents of this flawlessly executed, arresting debut collection. Of course, the very features listed by Thompson-Spires as flaws – her irony deliberately self-conscious – are its key attractions. That ‘Heads of the Colored People’ is a story of sketches, fragments leaves us as readers all the more intensely involved with it, reaching for truth even as we look away, sickened by the horror of truth’s implications.

Not all the stories in this collection are so deliberately oblique. Each and every one makes for compelling reading. My favourites are the linked stories – ‘Belles Lettres’, ‘The Body’s Defenses Against Itself’, the superb ‘Fatima, the Biloquist’. The brilliant little duology that is ‘This Todd’ and ‘A Conversation About Bread’. But then there’s the shocking needle-sharpness of ‘Suicide, Watch’ and ‘Wash Clean the Bones’ – I admire them all.

This is the kind of collection you might feel driven to read in a single sitting, just to see where it’s going, just to make sure that at least some of its characters emerge from their narratives unscathed. And to enjoy the writing, of course, the author’s seamlessly dexterous control of voice and form. Thompson-Spires has talked about her reasons for training her gaze on the American black middle classes in particular – because the issues they face are often hidden and not openly discussed – and this is a book that will make you question tired assumptions just as often as it makes you laugh.

I think it’s brilliant. I am so eager to see what Thomspon-Spires writes next, because the second book is, more even than the debut, the proof of an author’s intent and future direction.

I am not sure whether I personally would have considered Heads of the Colored People as a typical Gordon Burn Prize contender, if there is such a thing and maybe there isn’t and maybe that’s the point, but for me these stories have a smoothed perfection about them – an MFA quality – that removes them from the jagged edge of immediacy I have come to associate with the prize. Maybe I’m talking tosh and it wouldn’t be the first time. In either case, I hope Thompson-Spires garners many more award nominations, because the significance of her achievement is not in doubt.

This novel opens with one of its twelve principal characters walking over Hungerford Bridge on her way to the National Theatre, and in one of those weird moments of synchronicity that happen more often than cold logic would give life credit for, that is exactly what I found myself doing the day I finished reading Girl, Woman, Other. How could I not think of Amma as I reached the bridge’s mid-point, stopping, as I so often do when making that particular transition, to gaze out at the lights of London, to meditate on where the city is headed, where I see myself now in relation to it?

This is a great symphony of a novel, one in which a number of story threads and character arcs are gradually woven together – or unravelled, if you prefer to see it that way – in a dense and skilfully designed tapestry of narrative. No character is random, no incident irrelevant. And though many of the book’s central characters live in London and the novel has a great deal to say about that city in particular this is far from being exclusively a London novel.

Reading Girl, Woman, Other is an experience not unlike wandering through the departure lounge of an international airport: you watch individuals, couples, families, hear snatches of their conversations, pick up intimations of their worries and dreams, experience fleeting visions of a hundred lives. All are different, yet all are connected. All, for those moments in which you encounter them, seem somehow intimately and uncannily connected with your own.

The way the book is written, the form it takes – an unstoppable river of words alternately close-packed and free-wheeling, skittish – is for me at least its greatest joy. In its disregard for conventional arrangements of paragraphs and cut-and-dried syntax, the novel offers an irresistible invitation to dive right in: to be with its people, to question your own choices, motivations and assumptions, to recognise the role you play in shaping the lives of others and of our body politic. The use of different Englishes and registers of English forms an inalienable part of the work”s innate musicality.

In its interest in the absolute now as the uppermost layer of the peculiar arrangement of time we know as history, Girl, Woman, Other is absolutely a Gordon Burn book. As an intense and vivid evocation of the lives of black British women, how they have always been here and have always mattered, this work is essential. I don’t mind admitting that I fell in love with it, and more than a little.

Literally minutes after finishing reading This Brutal House and while in the process of checking a reference I discovered Ryan Murphy’s HBO series Pose (currently available on BBC iPlayer and amazingly good). In the space of a week I have gone from knowing nothing about the background to Govinden’s novel to knowing at least something about it. I kind of wish I’d discovered Pose before reading This Brutal House but at the same time I’m glad I didn’t, firstly because I can now enter the world of the book again retrospectively and with added sumptuous visuals, and secondly because reading the book ‘blind’ delivers the kind of literary electric shock that reminds us of why we are readers and (especially) why we are writers.

I found this book difficult (a compliment), not in its subject matter so much as the way in which its content is delivered. I’m not a fan of the omniscient voice narrator – I tend to slide away from fabulism – and so I found the use of the first person plural for the Mothers’ narrative somewhat distancing even as it is perfectly appropriate for its context. The narrative is largely expository, the text so dense in places it feels as if you’re having to fight your way inside it. I found it most effective to read this novel in hour-long chunks, so as to immerse myself fully and not to lose the thread.

All these criticisms, in the end, act as plus points: This Brutal House is the kind of novel that stays with you forever, that, once having read it, you can pick up whenever you want and recapture its sense of itself in just a few splendid paragraphs.

I would have liked the book to deliver more of the atmosphere of the vogue balls themselves, the artistry, the coding, the furious competition. Unsurprisingly I enjoyed the formal invention of the vogue caller chapters and could have done with more of them. Stand-out sequences for me were Teddy’s experience in the Chanel store (everything about that chapter is genius) and his later dialogue with the refuse collectors.

At the heart of the book lies Teddy’s story with Sherry and the fleeting glimpses we are offered throughout the course of the novel prove effective as a uniting thread. To ask for more of Sherry and Teddy would seem too greedy.

I know already that This Brutal House will not be my favourite book from the Gordon Burn longlist – in a sense, it is not a novel that was written ‘for’ me and that is well and good – but I know also that it must be one of the contenders most worthy of winning. In entering new territory, both in terms of form and subject matter, in its willingness to take risks, in its superb level of literary achievement, in its opening of the reader’s eyes to social division and hidden oppression, in its reflection on a historical moment This Brutal House loudly embodies the spirit of the Gordon Burn Prize and I will long treasure what it has brought to me, not just as a reader but as a writer too.

Category is: writing realness. Walk.