I met John Tottenham in LA because we have the same publisher, Semiotext(e). I was intrigued to read his first novel, Service, because I'm interested in first novels written by middle-aged people. In sport, it's good to be young, but not always in literature. You have to go through some kind of trouble before you can write a book. Service is about a character called Sean - a double of Tottenham - who is in his late forties
The book begins with the parents of Catt Greene (an avatar for Kraus) as they start a family and strive to attain the American Dream. Catt's family circumstances remain precarious, and bright-but-bullied Catt is going off the rails by the time she reaches her teens. The family's abrupt decision to emigrate to New Zealand reroutes her from what increasingly feels like a foregone dead-end.
Meanwhile, contemporary romance-smutty, cozy, saccharine, highly lucrative for the moment- has saturated the market, causing a panic over the tastes of the masses and the state of writing about marriage. It's been a long time since there's been a novel in the genre worth talking about. Thankfully and just in time, Erin Somers, journalist and author of the novel Stay Up With Hugo Best, has given us one of the best marriage novels of the decade.
In Hervé Guibert's book Ghost Image, he writes about preparing to take a portrait of his mother. It's so vivid in its description. Even though the book has no images, I can envision the photograph so clearly. He goes to great lengths to ensure the image is perfect, that his mother looks a certain way. At the end of the essay, we learn that the film was blank - there is no photograph.
English, strictly speaking, is not my first language by the way, Claire-Louise Bennett wrote in her first book, 2015's Pond, a series of essayistic stories by an autofictional narrator. What was her first language, then? She doesn't know, and she's still in search of it. I haven't yet discovered what my first language is so for the time being I use English words in order to say things.
Helm by Sarah Hall Faber, out now Hall is best known for her glittering short stories: this is the novel she's been working on for two decades. Set in Cumbria's Eden valley, it tells the story of the Helm the only wind in the UK to be given a name from its creation at the dawn of time up to the current degradation of the climate. It's a huge, millennia-spanning achievement, spotlighting characters from neolithic shamans to Victorian meteorologists to present-day pilots.
