‘An artist’s attention to colour and detail’: The best Literary Fiction out now – Three
Three Days in June by Anne Tyler (Chatto & Windus £14.99, 176pp)
‘You and I were going to grow old side by side, once upon a time,’ says Max to his ex-wife Gail about two thirds of the way through Anne Tyler’s latest.
Their only daughter Debbie has just got married and Max is staying, along with his cat, at Gail’s house for the occasion, their relationship robust enough to withstand the proximity, albeit not without a fair side-helping of unease and regret.
Tyler tells the story of what brought this intriguingly contrary couple to this frank moment of reckoning over the three days of Gail’s nuptials, unpacking almost a life time of optimism, self-loathing, disillusionment and remorse into a deceptively mundane story of late middle-age drift.
That it is far from Tyler’s best novel is no reason at all not to read it.
The City Changes Its Face by Eimear McBride (Faber £20, 336pp)
The City Changes Its Face is available now from the Mail Bookshop
The key to reading the radical Irish novelist McBride is to let her thrillingly chopped up, misshapen sentences wash over you, like flotsam in a tide.
That said, her latest novel makes most sense if you’ve read its 2016 predecessor The Lesser Bohemians, which tells the story of a head-rush love affair between a teenage drama student and her tutor in Camden in 1994.
The City Changes Its Face retreads that territory two years on, with Eily and Stephen meeting to discuss the awful events that led to their break-up, although ‘discuss’ is a laughably inadequate term for the mash-up of recollection, recrimination, miscomprehension and anger their conversation throws up.
It’s not an easy read, but McBride’s heretical assault on grammar and semantics embed the violence of her two characters’ inner worlds in ways that seem to recalibrate the nature of experience itself.
The Violet Hour by James Cahill (Sceptre £18.99, 368pp)
There’s something of F. Scott Fitzgerald about the way Cahill writes about the very rich.
His second novel is set, once again, in the art world, this time widened to take in the international art scene of London and New York, and centres on the complex relationship between disillusioned art dealer Lorna, her former client and lover, the indecently feted Thomas Haller, and octogenarian collector Leo Goffman, whose lust for masterpieces is almost sexual.
Their lives converge when a young man seemingly commits suicide after falling from a building, sparking a heady story fraught with questions about money, value and the bleak side of fame.
Cahill writes with an artist’s attention to colour and detail, but also with an acute awareness of surface glitter, be it the gleaming facades of 21st-century London or the confected personas we present to each other and ourselves.