In Brief - September’s Best New Books
Yr Dead by Sam Sax
(Daunt Books, 288pp)
The debut novel from acclaimed poet Sam Sax is a riotous, playful assemblage of breakneck storytelling and dazzling prose. As Ezra, a queer Jewish man, attends a protest in New York, he pauses, douses himself in gasoline and set himself on fire. This is both the book’s shocking start and its heartbreaking end. In between, Sax tells, with uncommon compassion, the story of a life — and what a life. From an unsettled and troubled childhood, and a deftly sketched and knotty family history, to Ezra’s final years (friendless, largely, and populated with a series of often arduous relationships) in Manhattan, the narrative zip of Yr Dead, bolstered by a musicality suited to its iconic setting, emerges as a stirring and enveloping citysong. There is poetry here, of course (‘late Autumn comes in like a cold, dead watch’), and a protagonist difficult for the reader to leave behind. Thematically rich (the book inquires smartly into internet culture, mortality, religion, and is especially sharp on the loss of animal species due to extinction) and politically combative, Yr Dead occupies a non-judgemental standpoint on those weary souls for who can no longer take it. ‘So many of us are tired, and tried our best, and are ready to be gone,’ declares Ezra. This remarkable novel is loaded with insights into the human condition just as wise and just as devastating.
Close Encounters of the Fungal Kind by Richard Fortey
(William Collins, 336pp)
From attending the hugely popular porcini festival in the northern Italian town of Borgo Val di Toro (‘a hub of mushroom worship’) to hunting for the iconic Giant Puffball in the Chiltern Hills, the scientist and natural historian Richard Fortey explores the history of fungi with a winning passion. More than a mere educational guidebook, Fortey’s absolute immersion in a subject for which most of us will have only a passing awaresness results in an unexpectedly delightful page-turner and an essential addition to the popular science shelves. If you’re the kind of person who wouldn’t know their Brown Rotter from their Cabbage Parachute, this engaging book is an ideal place to start. Beautifully designed and recounted with a poet’s sensibility (‘The leaves are still green, but a cool edge to the breeze betokens change. Late autumn is in prospect’), Close Encounters of the Fungal Kind represents a distinct form of personal passion: the kind offered with enough generosity of spirit to permit allcomers entry to the writer’s particular tribe.
Generation Loss by Elizabeth Hand
(Influx Press, 360pp)
Originally published in 2007, Influx Press provide exceptional public literary service with this timely re-print of the first (of four) novel by the American writer Elizabeth Hand featuring Cass Neary, a once-feted photographer who documented the extremes of New York’s punk mid-70’s punk scene before drink and drugs wrecked her creative impetus. Three decades later, a sketchy commisison to interview another photographer, the notorious and reclusive Aphrodite Kamestos, sees Neary caught up in a tangled mystery triggered by the disappearance of a teenage girl. Genre trappings abound (motels unsettling enough to trouble David Lynch; shifty locals with secrets to spare; a wintry, vividly imagined island setting off the coast of Maine) but Generation Loss (its title a reference to the gradual reduction in resolution and quality when original photographs are continually copied) dismantles narrative norms with assurance and abandon. Exceptional crime writing and literary fiction of the highest order, readers in search of a character-driven page-turner should get on board. Recommended unreservedly.
All My Precious Madness by Mark Bowles
(Galley Beggar Press, 276pp)
‘Fuck them. Sloppy latte drinking fucks.’ Welcome to the world of Henry Nash: frustrated academic and unfliching observer of a world going rapidly to the dogs. Delivered in a chapterless, first-person near-monologue, Nash tells the story of his northern working-class upbringing, his time amongst the priviliged fools of Oxford (‘I wore my learning, such as it was, like a trenchcoat on a summer’s day’) and the later stages of a life marked by the cruel demands of both loss and love. Aside the masterful storytelling (the novel’s multiple decade-hopping strands are deftly stiched together), Bowles’ prose is exceptional, and he grants his protagonist a startling and rich vocabularly: imagine a voice as scabrous and precise as Uncle Monty’s with a side serving of Chris Morris and you’re halfway there. A politically astute and deeply satisfying rebuttal to middle-aged-white-men-railing-against-an-unrecognisable-world literary norms, this incendiary debut marries its brutal observation to an implacable humanism and, in doing so, swerves the usual hectoring and elevates the reading experience. Add Mark Bowles to the extraordinary stable of writers (2024 has already been augmented by the emergence of Noémi Kiss-Deáki and her debut novel Mary and the Rabbit Dream) currently being published by Galley Beggar Press.