"The Guest" by Emma Cline

An audio book.

Alex, a women, 22, with debts, exploits people (male clients in particular) to get from day to day. She's with Simon (about 50, rich, divorced with a daughter) but ex Dom (who she stole from) keeps calling her. Simon tells her to get out of his house. She takes his watch and decides to stay nearby until his party in 7 days, expecting a reconciliation. She gate-crashes parties, befriends childminders, steaals from handbags, meets Nicholas who (in contrast to her) is paid to be nice to people. She quickly assess those she meets for their usefulness to her.

She meets Jack, a 17 y.o. who falls in love with her. He's on meds and has taken a year off school (perhaps because of emotional trouble with a girl who ditched him). He offers to steal money from his father's safe so she could pay off Dom who has tracked her down and is threatening to tell Simon about her. She likes the idea, planning to dump Jack after and return to Simon. But Jack was lying about the safe. The book ends as Alex approached Simon at the party.

I liked

• She takes "pills to stitch the loose hours together."
• With Simon it was "her responsibility to enjoy things so he didn't need to."
• Someone "decided to call what he had a 'life'"
• Someone talks "as if reading from a script"

but not

• "make him visibly recoil"

I think there are 4 occasions when she notices clothes stuck between people's buttocks.

I didn't see much in it. Alex seems to learn nothing during the book, leaving damaged paintings and people in her wake. I don't find the episodes interesting.

Other reviews

• Arin Keeble (Cline uses the metaphorical possibilities of water, pools and beaches deftly. These are conspicuous leitmotifs that, because of their symbolic richness, never feel overdetermined. )
• Liska Jacobs (a deceptively simple story)
• Rob Doyle (Sultry and engrossing, with a note of menace, it’s a gorgeously smart affair whose deceptive lightness conceals strange depths and an arresting originality)

"Self-portrait with family" by Amaan Hyder (Nine Arches Press, 2024)

Poems from Magma, Poetry London, Poetry Review, The Rialto, etc.

"nice legs mahmood" uses slashes, the only punctuation being apostrophes. The first 6 stanzas are 6-lined - roughly equal rectangles. The final stanza is 5-lined. Here it is, with the end of stanza 6.

i saw someone on a train eating an apple / munch mush common enough / yet uninhibited by the unpopular core / woody button to collar / only the stalk forsworn / branch tip grip provided to dangle this sinful world

It looks like the slashes replace commas or dashes, so why not use commas and dashes? And what are the line-breaks for? They seem needlessly obscure to me. Why the lofty "forsworn"? Why "i" rather than "I"? Why all this distraction from content?

“Post-independence studies (I)” is in terza rima, which doesn’t disguise the infodumpy prose any more than moon/June rhymes would.

They made their cautious way back to their hospital accommodation flat, where my mother began a generous letter home and, across from her at the kitchen table, my father sat unquestioningly sticking photos into an album given to the bride and groom as a wedding present. A photo showed generations of men, formally dressed, arranged in rows. It was said that my father’s family tree began with the prophet, so each man wore a grave look and a fez on their head

Why “on their head”? Where else would one wear a Fez? Soon, we get more info -

The distance between Hyderabad and Delhi was greater than that between London and Berlin yet Indian was as far as the geographical description went for our family in England. My parents moved from one town to another, from accommodation to a house of their own

On p.54 there's quoted prose that on p.55 is broken into 5 stanzas. Eh? Then it's more radically re-rendered in succeeding pages, and on later pages developed. p.82 uses only commas as punctuation, though even those are suppressed at line-endings.

I like "at an LGBT icebreaker ... We stood on chairs:/ we had to order ourselves alphabetically/ without touching the floor of the union./ We weaved past one another, asking names/ across the intimacy of ledges" (p.63).

Many of the poems are longer than a page. There are several braided pieces (parents vs impending lover, etc), and mentions of older men. The "coming out" anecdotes sound a little dated to me, though I guess his ancestry didn't help.

"Clear" by Carys Davies

A short (3hr) audio book.

1840s. John Ferguson (some sections are from his PoV), married to Mary (about 40), is now part of the break-away Free Church. Poor, he's doing a job for land-owner Strachen which will mean he's a month away from home. He arrives on a remote Scottish island in "the silvery murk of the afternoon" to evict Ivor, a loner who Strachen thinks is a simpleton. He brings eviction notes and a gun. He's taken language lessons - Ivor's only language is related to Shetland, and he may be its only speaker. John stays in the Barker's abandoned house. He has an accident and is unconscious for a day or so.

Ivor (some sections are from his PoV) finds John's photo of Mary and falls in love. He finds John unconscious, carries him to his hovel, and looks after him, falling in love with him instead. Ivor was ill last year. Now he fishes and knits. Peggy the horse is his best friend.

John learns Ivor's language - the many words for sea and cloud. Nouns first. Ivor finds John's gun and works out what's going on. Mary pawns her ring and follows him - to save him doing something unpleasant just for money, for her.

We're led to believe that intimacy takes place between the men. I don't think this is meant to surprise us. When Mary arrives she understands and suggests that both of the men return to the mainland with her. And Peggy too.

Other reviews

• Clare Clark (despite moments of affecting poignancy, too often it feels underwritten, even thin. ... John Ferguson is granted a mere four weeks on Ivar’s island, four weeks into which must be compressed not only his recovery but the slow unfurling of a deep and transformational friendship. It is not enough.)
• Stuart Kelly (a story about the hard-won acquisition of clarity.)

"Paradise block" by Alice Ash (Serpent's tail, 2022)

Stories from Popshot, etc.

• Eggs - The narrator - a schoolgirl - has a little brother Vincent and a (useless?) mother - "she". Min, the old neighbour, sometimes comes round to help. They live in a flat - Paradise Block, in a town called Clutter. They're in debt. Their flat catches fire. They start eating more eggs. The mother starts painting the burnt walls, using watercolour paint. Min tells the narrator that she's the mother now. The narrator strains her back and is hospitalised for a little while, needing a stick. She overhears that she has varicose veins and arthritis. Her mother wears the narrator's school uniform to take Vincent to school, returning with a gold star. She's taken the narrator's headphones to listen to the narrator's favourite singer - Robbie Williams.
• Planes - Bennie Dodd, 9, lives in Plum Regis with his single mother Elaine who does phone work (mostly sex). He writes long (surprisingly literate) letters to his father c/o "Sunny Air". Bennie thinks his father's a pilot who sends him a model plane each birthday. He wants his father to collect him. He thinks of running away using his mother's stash of cash. He discovers that his mother's made up the story about his father for his sake. Actually he's a caretaker of a flat in Clutter. His classmates learn about his mother's job. His teacher, Miss Michelmore is concerned. He talks to Jake Standing, who comes from a bad family.
• The Flea-trap - “I” and “you” have a baby and kittens. The “I” uses words like “muster”, “subtly”, and abundance”. Their bedrooms are in a flat basement, with other rooms on the ground floor. They buy a flea-attractor and take shifts to obsessively kill the fleas. Meanwhile their child-carer Angelique takes their baby away. They’re unconcerned. They eject the kittens. No
• You - After being engaged for 5 years, a man’s left the narrator, Rose. She goes to a club looking for You. She brings a man home to Flat 4. He fails to get an erection. 3 pages (No)
• Timespeak - Mr Grisco delivers groceries to the narrator, Mr Cornflower, whose been a customer for 15 years. The Department store opposite is putting Mr Grisco out of business.  Elaine often  phones the narrator about his funeral plans. They’ve become friends. He watches kids throw eggs against a tree. He goes deaf. Mr Grisco visits more often, storing some goods at the flat, taking calls. A woman turns up.
• Hungry - The male narrator watches a woman messily eating. The narrator’s mother (15 years younger than aunt Min, a widow who works in the Stockings section of the department store) is eating a burger. They go to Min’s flat. There’s a knock at the door. It’s the woman, asking the narrator out.  5 pages. (No)
• Ball - John, about to go and collect Benny and bring him back for a short stay, is anxious and starts drinking. He’s not seen Benny for years. He’s paying for the semi that Benny and Elaine live in, with Paolo. He misses the train. Elaine phones him and puts Benny on the phone. He’s 12 and not happy. John goes to his local, recalling a visit to the fair with Benny. Benny had refused a balloon because he didn’t want to be sad if it blew away. John drinks with Bill Standing and a barmaid, moaning about Elaine.
• Complaint -A department boss sees the girl (3rd-person protagonist) at the bus stop. He’d touched her up once and called her Sexy Bum. He moans to her about popular department boss Dorian Bell. He wanted to expand his Glasses department. He's sent her a poem. Later the boss txts her to say that Min's legs are bad. He tells her to come to the admin offices. She's asked to provide harrassment evidence against Bell. When she returns to the Glassware section her flatmate Pinkie has taken her place. The boss invites her out. A man on a bus offers her a job at another store.
• Doctor Sharpe - Rose Durrell (1st person) goes to the doctor, hoping he'll fancy/love her. She finds porn on his computer. She lives in flat 17. Next time she goes to the surgery the receptionist tells her she has mental problems and should go elsewhere. She tries to make herself really ill. She recalls visits from Elaine years before. She cuts herself repeatedly and drives to the surgery. He puts her to sleep and stitches her face. Back home she phones her mother for the first time in 7 years, leaving a message that she found a man but he turned out to be shallow, only interested in her looks.
• Black, dark hill - "Our girl" and "her boy" are on their first holiday, together in a boat on a river. The girl's shadow in the water it treated rather like a person. The boat they're in collapses, disintegrates. He's caught up in fishing wire and goes still. She integrates with her shadow and floats away (interesting. Very unlike the other pieces. 7 pages)
• Sea god - Min, now a widow, has a son Crispin. She recalls her honeymoon when a woman dropped her bag over the side of the Isle of Wight ferry and Louie made sure it was retrieved. She has lots of junk (ex department store stuff) in her front room. Her washing machine's broken, so she goes to a launderette. She sits on the beach, sees an attractive man metal-detecting. They talk. Later she collects Louie's stuff and her jewellery in a bag and (we assume) dumps it in the sea. On the beach again, the man shows her the things he's found - a gold tooth (she'd trained to be a dentist), some of Louie's stuff. (my favourite piece so far)
• Bad elastic - Marie (21, quite comfortably brought up) and Shell (26, her baby in care - she wants it back) are a couple living in the flats. Shell is saving money in a drawer. Marie goes out with it intending to open an account but ends up buying an expensive dress, giving £10 (i.e. 3 pots of babyfood or 10 cigarettes) to a homeless woman, then getting mugged. Shell seems to be forgiving about it.
• John's bride - Annie Dodd (1st person - she uses works like "transfixed" and "slithered") didn't speak much English when they were married (John was 64 then). The doctor tells him to change his lifestyle or else. She cooks him food her mother had taught her - there are pages about her preparing stuffed squid (that looks like his heart). He dies. She's not upset. She does well out of the insurance. She meets John's son? (No)
• Note - There's a female caretaker now. She clears out Mr Cornflower's flat.

Various props recur - White Fingers, etc. The first-person diction doesn't match my image of the characters. Few betray strong emotions - I don't think we're invited to feel sorry for the characters.

Other reviews

• Kate Tyte (Poverty, alcoholism, mental illness, loneliness, and crime are all recurrent themes, but there isn’t any heavy, issue-based handwringing here ... Many of the stories are written in the first person, and all the narrators are unreliable ... ‘Planes’, my favourite story in the collection)
• Paul Spalding-Mulcock (this astonishing collection innovatively fuses Dirty Realism with darkly gothic surrealism and put me in mind of Raymond Carver, Charles Bukowski and Chuck Palahniuk. Washington Irving and Edgar Allan Poe lurked in the shadows with David Lynch perhaps casting his eye over proceedings. I even picked up faint hints of Stephen King.)
• Fran Slater (I was particularly affected by ‘Planes’ ... And in ‘Bad Elastic’, the story of Marie’s desperation to escape battling with her need to cling on is so heartbreaking it had to earn a mention.)
• Connor Harrison (sometimes it feels as if a story ought to have taken more risks on the page. In ‘Planes’, ... as the letters continue, they come to feel too neat, too verbose for such a young writer ... in [John Dodd's] story, ‘Ball’, his thoughts and choice phrases rarely step outside the stereotype)
• Lydia Bunt (This world is characterised by frugality, but certain motifs repeat in this mix – the foods honey, wine, black bread and White Fingers biscuits. The colour pink is also a common presence)

"Parasol Against the Axe" by Helen Oyeyemi

An audio book.

Prague. Bags of imagination. Rambling. Gave up after an hour or so.

Other reviews

• Sarah Crown (the story of a parched summer weekend in which two women, Hero Tojosoa and Dorothea Gilmartin, converge on Prague for a hen weekend ... the novel takes on a life of its own, gleefully jettisoning convention, and playing fast and loose with both its characters’, and its readers’, expectations ... brilliant, baffling, beguiling)
• Hannah Kofmann (The frame story of Parasol Against the Axe has a simple articulation: Prague-as-narrator relays the time that our antihero, named Hero, came to the city for the bachelorette party of an old friend, Sofie, on an invitation she was certainly expected to decline. The third member of the old friendship trio, Dorothea, has declined the invitation but nonetheless mysteriously arrives in Prague on revenge business ... there comes a point where, regardless of Oyeyemi’s talent, the liveliness of her prose and imagination, one wants to blurt out, “No more! No more stories!” The perils of endless digression materialize in the fact that, by the end of the novel, the final sewing-up of the primary plot does not mean that much)

"Amuk" by Khairani Barokka (Nine Arches Press, 2024)

Poems from Granta, Massachusetts Review, Ploughshares, Poetry London, Rialto, Stand etc. An impressive list

Near the start it says that indonesian has no tenses. In the book she indicates this by using notation like "the waters are [will be, were] rageful", "filled-fill-willfill" or
"[came
  come
  will come]"

Later there's discussion about definitions of "amuk"/"amok" (as in "running amok") quoting from various sources. On p.44 she writes "i would like a catchy phrase to describe the twisting of a word into a context that pathologies and derides the original cultures of this word as belonging to psychopaths, then forces those cultures to include this psychopathic description in new dictionaries" which she expands upon at length, using loads of white space. On p.50 (yes, 6 pages later) she points out that that such a definition "joins the indonesian ministry of education's/ dictionary itself/ as the first entry". Why is "dictionary itself" alone on a line?

There's much else I don't understand. Here's a sample -

'we will corporate-social-responsibility your revolutionary indigeneities and oil slick our way through the feel-good advertisement landscape'   [iron and haze care not for how all waterways breathe with human blood as their inverse and keeper]

I think I understand the intent of the first 2 lines, but why compress, using "corporate-social-responsibility" as a verb, when there's so much white space going spare? Can anything "oil slick" through a landscape? What do the square brackets mean? And what does the text inside the brackets mean?

In "sacred waterways/ mowed down for influencer wedding venues" (p.32) what does "mowed down" mean?

"why must we relay a litany of genocides/ to try to spark a pinprick of empathy/ in silk-coccooned minds" sounds like purple prose.

"there are secret, sacred homes/ hidden in planets across linguistic cosmologies/ (so complex they baffle string theory)" puzzles me (I know roughly what string theory is).

Other reviews

• Emma Lee

"Apples Never Fall" by Liane Moriarty

An audio book. Sydney. One time-line begins when Joy disappears - we see how the family and the police react. Another timeline begins months before, when Savannah appears. Some of the action is observed by characters who aren't seen again.

Joy (69) Delauney and Stan ran a tennis club. Their children are Brooke (about 30), Logan, Troy, and Amy (who has mental issues). They'd all been top 5 in the Australian junior ratings. Joy wants grandchildren. She doesn't know that Brooke (who's started her physiotherapy business and has migraines) has begun a trial separation with Grant, or that Logan is splitting with Indira. Stan's most successful pupil Harry won Wimbledon then changed coach. He wants to made a come-back. Troy is rich. Savannah had recently knocked on Joe and Stan's door at random, wanting help because her partner had hit her. They'd given her a bed. She was interested in them, and made the meals. They'd had sex for the first time in ages. Joy is doing a life-writing course. We learn that the marriage was bad enough at times for her to plan to leave. Stan's mother left his father because he hit her. Stan used to suddenly leave the family for a night (once 5 nights) when things got too much. Do his kids inherit this way of coping?

Savannah goes to Troy, claiming that his father made a pass at her. He pays her to stop her telling his mother. The siblings start investigating Savannah. Her ex says she’s a habitual lier. Image searches reveal that Savannah is Harry’s sister. She admits that she was angry about her brother’s success and blamed the coaches. The family learns that it was Joy who had made Harry change coach, not Harry’s dad (as they'd been told). She wanted Stan to have more time to coach their own kids.

Troy’s ex, Claire, is with someone else. She wants to use one of the embryos they’d frozen.

Months after Savannah leaves, Joy (“a stick of dynamite with a very long fuse”) abandons her bike when it gets a puncture. She and Stan haven't been getting on well. When she gets home, grumpy, she discovers that Harry's sent Stan a draft of his auto-biography. Harry's father had told him that he had to win at tennis to gt money to pay for her sister's cancer treatment, so he cheated. Joy disappears before Stan does his usual disappearing trick.

An abandoned bicycle is picked up by a man who puts it into his car. He dies in an accident minutes later. People (including Brooke) are overheard in a cafe talking about a family member who disappeared a week before. Joy had texted each of her children that she wanted to go off grid for a while. Stan had scratches on his face and had had the car expensively cleaned next day. The police (Nicole and Ethan) suspect Stan. A body’s found - not Joy's.

As the police are arresting Stan, Joy returns. She'd left a note but the dog had eaten it. She'd been wondering where to go when Savannah had called her. They'd been together for 3 weeks. While Harry had been managed by his father, Savannah's mother had been starving her to make her into a ballet dancer.

Covid hits. Indira and Logan get back together. Stan and Joy find a way to carry on. We learn that Stan's dad told Stan to walk away when he was angry, rather than hit people. Savannah visits her mother, locking her into her bedroom with food. On the flight back she tells the man next to her that her mother plays tennis.

Savannah's family, like Joy's, has traits that pass from one generation to the next. It's the longest audio book I've heard. Too long.

Other reviews

• Beejay Silcox (Apples Never Fall ends up feeling indulgently overgarnished, like some ornate cafe breakfast that’s designed to be Instagrammed rather than eaten. It’s all perfectly readable, but it’s hard not to want something more from someone so scabrously smart. “If Joy had been young and beautiful,” Moriarty writes, “the street would’ve been crawling with reporters.” As she’s a woman in her 60s, the case simmers along as a minor neighbourhood scandal. It’s hard not to feel, in so clumsily grafting Joy’s story to a young, titillating stranger, Moriarty has done exactly the same thing)
• Ivy Pochoda (The novel’s focus starts to meander in the last third. As Moriarty juggles two prime suspects, we lose sight of the family dynamic, which is the more compelling part of the story. Instead of a nail-biting fifth set, we are served up a handicap round robin played at the local club in which a whole bunch of cute clues and red herrings coalesce into a comical explanation of Joy’s fate. )