CHRISTMAS IN AUSTIN
by Benjamin Markovits (Faber £16.99, 432 pp)
CHRISTMAS IN AUSTIN by Benjamin Markovits (Faber £16.99, 432 pp)
If you haven’t read the first in this rangy, yet addictively immersive, American family saga, all you need know is that Paul Essinger, retired from his undistinguished tennis career, is having a slow-motion breakdown.
Now, we learn that he’s walked out on his girlfriend and young son to build what sounds suspiciously like a utopian commune.
When Paul’s mother — who, as a German-born, respectably successful author, has a quietly absorbing backstory herself — invites Paul’s ex to join the entire clan in Austin for Christmas, the scene is set for fireworks.
But that’s not really Markovits’ style. He’s as interested in the arguments we have with ourselves as with others (we’re often plunged deep inside characters’ heads, to great effect) and excels at depicting the sticky, tricky, constantly shifting sands of family allegiances.
This is up there with the best contemporary Christmas novels — equal to, if very different from, Anne Enright’s The Green Road (although it’s the great Tessa Hadley whom Markovits recalls more).
AGATHA
by Anne Cathrine Bomann (Sceptre £9.99, 160 pp)
AGATHA by Anne Cathrine Bomann (Sceptre £9.99, 160 pp)
In the mould of A Man Called Ove, this diverting, rather sweet, physician-heal-thyself tale has been a huge international bestseller.
Set in the suburbs of Paris in the late Forties, it’s narrated by an unnamed psychiatrist who, at nearly 72, is just five months and 800 sessions away from retirement.
Such calculations, in fact, matter more to him than his patients, with whom he is increasingly bored, although the prospect of retirement isn’t filling him with joy, either — quite the reverse.
But then along comes Agatha: alarmingly thin, ghostly pale and deeply troubled.
As the facts of her life emerge — she’s the daughter of a blind watch repairman — so, too, do the book’s themes: the invisibility of age, the blinkers of habit . . . yes, the doctor’s own afflictions.
Bomann is a psychologist herself, and, although her at-a-sitting debut is on the slight side, she effectively makes her case for the importance of opening one’s eyes and heart.
BOTTLE GROVE
by Daniel Handler (Bloomsbury £18.99, 240 pp)
BOTTLE GROVE by Daniel Handler (Bloomsbury £18.99, 240 pp)
The fact that Daniel Handler is better known as Lemony Snicket might make you give Bottle Grove the benefit of the doubt.
But when what appears to be a rape is somehow relegated to the status of incidental detail, you’ll probably find any inclination towards granting Handler the indulgence he continually demands fading fast.
This is, to say the least, a misjudged affair — a tale of two couples set in early tech-boom San Francisco that isn’t the satire of greed or sexy examination of animalistic desire it imagines itself to be, and whose characters’ frequently sozzled states are no more confused than the narrative itself.
The overall effect is of being in the unpleasantly insistent confidences of someone who, erroneously, fancies himself a tremendously slick yarn-spinner.
And don’t get me started on Handler’s not infrequently nonsensical wordplay, which is at once smugly preening and constipated.