‘Wild, gross, undeniably energetic’: The Literary Fiction to be reading now – GREATEST OF
GREATEST OF ALL TIME by Alex Allison (Dialogue £18.99, 368pp)
ALLISON’S acknowledgements for this novel thank friends for backing his ‘mad project’.
Why mad? Probably because of the subject: two Premier League footballers who become secret lovers.
Think back to 2017, when Ross Raisin wrote a novel with a similar theme, A Natural, only to be told that fiction readers don’t want to read about football and football fans don’t want to read about gay romance.
But that was a good book, and so is this. It’s narrated by a teenage striker whose hometown club is fighting relegation.
Their season is electrified – on and off the pitch – by the signing of a talented French-Rwandan forward, likewise in his teens.
Brisker than A Natural, the writing efficiently portrays closeted desire simmering amid the dressing room’s brittle laddishness. Sometimes it verges on caricature, but there’s an impressive range of themes folded into the action, with a number of vivid scenes. Sincere and sharply observed.
SHOCK INDUCTION by Chuck Palahniuk (Corsair £15.99, 240pp)
EVEN if you don’t know the name Chuck Palahniuk, I bet you’ve heard of Fight Club, the Brad Pitt movie based on his 1996 novel, a split-personality drama about masculinity under capitalism.
A shock-jock of American letters, his books continue to serve as a gateway to literature for disaffected youth, offering an outstretched hand to anyone who has ever felt the odds stacked against them.
That same evergreen furrow is ploughed in his latest satire, a nasty near-future fable about a high school whose top students mysteriously vanish one by one, thanks to an internet-driven conspiracy to auction them off to billionaires.
The action turns on a rags-toriches plot by which a girl flees a troubled family – drink, drugs, abuse – only to find in her new-found freedo another form of captivity.
Wild, gross, undeniably energetic – like a punk version of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara And The Sun.
BEARTOOTH by Callan Wink (Granta £14.99, 256pp)
CALLAN Wink’s previous novel, August, a coming-of-age tale about a farmer’s son in backwoods America, didn’t get the love it deserved, possibly because it was among many excellent books that were unlucky to come out in 2020, when minds were on the pandemic.
His new novel, set in rural Montana, follows two brothers struggling to pay their father’s medical bills.
Help arrives when a shadowy local, known for shooting dead a boy who broke into his house, offers them cash to poach elk antlers and bearskins in Yellowstone National Park.
Wink knows his setting inside out, even if the thrillerish plot here isn’t as good a showcase for his gifts as the more relaxed August. Definitely a writer to stick with, though.