OLIGARCHY
OLIGARCHY by Scarlett Thomas (Canongate £14.99, 224 pp)
by Scarlett Thomas (Canongate £14.99, 224 pp)
We never see the oligarch in Scarlett Thomas’s latest: he’s a fabulously wealthy, shadowy Russian, possibly criminal, who has sent his adolescent daughter Natasha, the recently discovered product of a long-ago fling, to an all-girls English boarding school, ostensibly to protect her from kidnapping.
The school is a snake-pit of neurosis, with its rich, Instagram-obsessed pupils fixated by the latest diet fad to such an extent that one of them, Bianca, suddenly dies.
Soon after that, so does a teacher, rumoured to be a paedophile, and the queasy tone is set for this slippery, spiky comic horror that has a lot of dark fun satirising the relentless cultural objectification of female bodies, the garish inadequacies of rich but absent parents and the ruthlessly competitive nature of female relationships.
Thomas is mordantly entertaining on the many different forms power and control can take but she is also quietly agonising on the aloneness and vulnerability of modern-day teenage girls.
CHANCES ARE. . .
by Richard Russo (Allen & Unwin, £15.99, 320 pp)
CHANCES ARE. . . by Richard Russo (Allen & Unwin, £15.99, 320 pp)
There’s much to enjoy in Richard Russo’s typically nuanced portrait of three childhood friends reuniting as oldish men for one last weekend in a former haunt on Martha’s Vineyard before it is sold.
Teddy has eked out a solitary life as a small-scale publisher, Mickey is loud, boozy and loves rock ‘n’ roll, while Lincoln is the dedicated family man whose childhood holiday home is the venue for the jaunt.
It’s also the site of a key event in the lives of all three men many decades previously — the weekend Jacy, whom all three adored, disappeared and whose memory none of them has been able to shake.
But the way Jacy essentially remains a fantasy figure — arrested forever in the minds of Teddy, Lincoln and Mickey as a barefooted girl on the cusp of adulthood — is a problem Russo is unable to solve, and the increasingly crude plot-line exploring what might have happened to her distracts from the novel’s fine-grained exploration of troubled, small-town masculinity.
A pity, since Russo’s prose is so quietly melodious you can almost hear it singing.
RABBITS FOR FOOD
by Binnie Kirshenbaum (Serpent’s Tail, £12.99, 384 pp)
RABBITS FOR FOOD by Binnie Kirshenbaum (Serpent’s Tail, £12.99, 384 pp)
A psychotic breakdown is not often the stuff of comedy but, in her first novel in ten years, Binnie Kirshenbaum makes it so without belittling the subject.
Bunny, a successful novelist, hasn’t washed for days or left her NYC apartment for weeks, but is determined nonetheless to go out for dinner with her husband and friends on New Year’s Eve, despite despising precisely this sort of event.
And who can blame her, when over dinner the friends wax lyrical about balsamic vinegar, complain about the dead fish in the tank and blithely scoff octopus, an animal capable of experiencing extreme pain.
Bunny is also capable of feeling extreme pain, although that doesn’t stop her digging her fork into her thigh half-way through the main course, causing her long suffering husband to take her to the psych ward as the bells toll over New York.
Yet for all the delicious pleasure to be found in Bunny, scathing voice, it’s hard to fully warm to this novel, perhaps because its emotionally hollowed-out protagonist is so stubbornly set on self-obliteration there’s simply not enough of her left over for the reader.