Exit Management by Naomi Booth
Review by Cath Barton
At minus twenty-two degrees, even the densest blood materials start to turn; the beginnings of a human heart will still into black ice.
Two twenty-somethings, making their way in London, collide into a relationship. Both are trying on other people’s lives, insecure in their own. In her trawl through houses she can’t afford, Lauren walks into Little Venice, where between the canal and a street of the ‘beautiful and delicious things’ she craves, Cal curates a mews house for József, an elderly Hungarian exile, who has invited him to stay whenever it is not let out.
Lauren and Cal are also exiles, both of them from their families, both concealing shame about past traumas and anxieties. Lauren is attracted by József’s clean and grapefruit-fragrant house as much or more than she is by Cal. But József is dying and has asked Cal to help him at the end.
Naomi Booth describes, in precise prose, the ways in which Lauren and Cal attempt to reconstruct their lives and how they are bound to their pasts, however much they strive to escape them. In contrast, József’s past, is, for him, a story more vivid than the sad and dependent decline of his present. Booth paints her characters deftly; they are as sharply delineated as the colours of the oil painting that hangs over the fireplace in the living room in József’s house, and the sunsets that streak the skies of London with ‘torn ribbons’.
In less skilful hands, Lauren might have come across as a monstrous character. In fact, Booth shows how anyone living in our time might compromise their humanity in an attempt to move up in the world. Human Resources is an ironic name for the department in which Lauren is employed in an anonymous business in the City, her job to ensure that due process is followed when traders who have transgressed are dispatched. She is frighteningly good at this job of ‘exit management’, has deliberately hardened herself against any show of emotion, her meticulously-applied make-up more a carapace than a mask. It was as a teenager back in Yorkshire that she learned ‘how to knit frustration into ambition in the dark art of the beauty ritual’.
In her apocalyptic eco-horror novel Sealed (shortlisted for The Guardian’s Not the Booker prize in 2018), Booth posited a world in which bodies were betraying their inhabitants in an extreme way, their skin sealing them up. Here in Exit Management she explores the unreliability of both mind and body in ways which are equally horrific but entirely plausible.
The novel is set in 2018/9, post Grenfell, during Brexit, and reflects existential anxieties felt by parents and passed on to their children. It is also scarily prescient about the current pandemic, as Lauren obsesses about hand sanitising to counteract the risk of infection, and Cal ensures the houses he curates are free of all traces of those who have passed through them; they are as concerned about taking care of themselves as we all are now.
The more Lauren attempts to control, the more useless Cal feels, and after a climactic act two thirds of the way through the narrative their relationship unspools, with him finding sex ‘desolating’ and her feeling ‘trapped in the dark space between life and death’.
Booth’s prose is uncompromising and scalpel-like, highlighting details that make the reader shudder with their implications of things unpleasant and worse to come: the ‘wet black truffle, dense as a blood clot’ that József asks Cal to grate onto brioche when he is just back from hospital; the mouldy ‘ghost apple under the sofa’ in Lauren’s childhood home ‘growing back into the shape of a full white fruit’; the London sky, presaging a day when Lauren’s control is about to crack, that is ‘curdled grey’.
When I began to wonder whether the techicolour sunsets were a little too intense, even possibly stereotypical, I was drawn up short by the description of the dreaded Saturday nights of Lauren’s teenage years, when ‘she learns to recognise that the colour of the sunset above the MI is the same colour as the blood in your urine.’
As the scaffolding Lauren has carefully built up to support her life starts to come apart, so Booth’s prose begins to quicken and break down, form matching content, but with admirable constraint. There is no trace of melodrama in this taut and elegantly-written novel, but a measured weighting of what, in the end, is important in life and what is only vanity or hubris.
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Exit Management is published by Dead Ink Books, 10th September 2020