Welcome to ABC Arts' monthly book column: a shortlist of new releases read and recommended by The Bookshelf's Kate Evans and critics Declan Fry and Cher Tan.
All read voraciously and widely, and the only guidelines we give them are: make it a new release; make it something you think is great.
The resulting list features a story of female coming-of-age set inside Warhol's Factory; an "autobiography of the audience" that asks if we can enjoy the art of bad people; a freewheeling historical fiction set in the north of England, that follows a "saint" and his followers from the 7th century through to contemporary times; an absurdist anti-thriller about an "expert in nothing" from one of America's great contemporary satirists; and the latest English translation from Booker-winning South Korean novelist Han Kang (The Vegetarian), which will make you savour each sentence.
Nothing Special by Nicole Flattery
Bloomsbury
Irish writer Nicole Flattery made her name writing short fiction, winning awards and accolades from fellow writers such as compatriot Sally Rooney: "I truly love Nicole Flattery's writing" is right there on the cover of her debut novel, Nothing Special.
Who or what is "nothing special" in this novel? The most obvious candidate – at least initially — is 17-year-old Mae, riding the escalators of department stores in New York in 1966, looking for a life away from her alcoholic waitress mum, backstabbing school mates and grim future.
On her quest for something "special", Mae finds herself working in Andy Warhol's Silver Factory (aka The Factory). She's not one of the artistes or muses, the filmmakers or acolytes, the strutters and posers and beautiful people. Instead, she's a typist and transcriber, working through a box of tapes recorded by Warhol: his own intimate conversations as well as overheard scraps; intimate revelations, secrets, and stories of sex and drug-taking.
In real life, the Warhol transcripts were published as a: A Novel; in Nothing Special, we encounter their contents through Mae's eyes (or more accurately, ears). For Flattery, the act of transcribing is a device to explore listening, paying attention, and the ethics of eavesdropping on other people's lives.
As the words of these exotic strangers make their way into Mae's head and out again through her typing fingers, Flattery's book becomes more and more beguiling.
The author brings her fictional characters to vivid and awkward life, while the real members of the avant garde are carefully placed in the background, present but not too present.
Warhol himself shines brightly, and other figures appear briefly, but Flattery is careful not to ventriloquise them or pull focus away from her ordinary people.
We see Mae's uneasy transformation, both in the 60s and from the perspective of her older self, looking back with a cool and knowing eye.
From our first encounter with this young working-class woman, searching for a bigger world, we tumble down the rabbit hole and into an apparently bigger, more "special", artistic world — but find ourselves questioning that, too.
Flattery's clear, clean style creeps up on you, as do the ideas she's exploring. KE
Monsters by Claire Dederer
Sceptre (Hachette)
In Monsters, memoirist and critic Claire Dederer confronts one of our most topical questions: What do we do with the art of monstrous men?
She examines a number of artists, some familiar guests on the what-do-we-do-about-this-person's-badness circuit (Pablo Picasso, Roman Polanski), others more unexpected (Joni Mitchell, Sylvia Plath). What is gained and lost when we emphasise a sense of intimacy with our idols? (JK Rowling is one prominent example.)
The energy Dederer brings to this question comes, in part, from her angle: Monsters is billed as a "autobiography of the audience". It is a position that implicates us all, including the author.
In the chapter titled The Stain, Dederer writes:
"We live in a biographical moment, and if you look hard enough at anyone, you can probably find at least a little stain. Everyone who has a biography – that is, everyone alive – is either canceled or about to be canceled."
The book poses vital but discomfiting questions: Is empathy with monsters possible? Should the misdeed, in the end, become a "biography-ender"? Dederer invites us to consider what we might seek from "the drama of loudly denouncing the monster". "When you're having a moral feeling, self-congratulation is never far behind", she writes – one of a number of lines in the book that, once you've read them, feel as though they've expressed something both counterintuitive and true.
There is a bravura reading of Lolita that had me pumping my fist in furious agreement, advocating for the job description of any good novel as being "to reveal felt and lived experience, rather than what you think you ought to feel".
Monsters builds toward an unexpectedly affecting final chapter, The Beloveds, which looks at author Pearl Cleage's struggle to reconcile the beauty of Miles Davis's work with his abuse (her book offered a precedent for Dederer).
In the penultimate chapter, Drunks, Dederer reflects on Raymond Carver and her own personal struggles with alcohol, observing: "Recovery, as a way of living, makes you see things from the monster's point of view. You see things from his point of view because you are him."
This is criticism that is stylish but plain-spoken; witty, serious, and poignant. DF
Cuddy by Benjamin Myers
Bloomsbury
Benjamin Myers is a writer interested in landscape, working class lives, old stories and mythologies of his place: the north of England. He has explored this previously in his novels The Gallows Pole and The Offing. In his latest, Cuddy, he has chosen a monument to the north as his focus: Durham Cathedral. Well, not exactly, because he begins the novel three centuries before the cathedral was built. Then the novel hops forward from the seventh century, into the 14th, 17th and 19th centuries, right up to 2019.
The cathedral was built to hold the remains of St Cuthbert – remains that never rotted, by the way – after his followers (the haliwerfolc, or wandering folk) spent years trudging around trying to find the best place for these holy remains. But if this sounds like a pious journey of some kind, solemnly guarding relics, searching for a resting place, it's really not.
This is an antic, lively, story of itchy monks and campfires, stonemasons and eels, women brewers and stray dogs, and groups of people for whom this saint was a comrade and familiar, known as Cuddy.
Each section in the novel is written in a different style, with the first section (Dunholme, AD 995) the most obviously experimental. There are scraps of conversation, cleverly connected excerpts from historical texts, and words that literally become smaller on the page — like voices becoming fainter as the tellers of the tale recede into the distance, carrying Cuddy's coffin onwards.
Once the travellers stop, to build the cathedral, we meet more workers of stone and the makers of food who sustain their work – observing them across centuries, and more dalliances and dramas, on and on, until we meet a young unskilled worker in 2019, poorly paid, looking after his mum. A good man, who has never set foot in the biggest landmark in his town.
It all holds together in a fresh melding of history and place. KE
Dr. No by Percival Everett
Text
Throughout his prolific writing career, Percival Everett has always managed to be both sharply funny and deadly serious. Many critics have called him a satirist, but I'd consider him to be more a cultural critic, only his form is fiction.
His 34-book oeuvre, which comprises mostly novels and short story collections, gained wider attention post-publication of his 2001 page-turner Erasure, a tale within a tale about a Black writer's existential crisis and the racist publishing industry that caused it.
Other notable books include Glyph (1999), an absurdist send-up of academia; and Booker Prize nominee The Trees (2021), a crime caper with elements of horror and a racial allegory set in Trump-era Mississippi – which also manages to be very funny.
His latest, Dr. No, revolves around Black mathematics professor Wala Kitu, who introduces himself to the reader with this explanation:
"Wala is Tagalog for nothing, though I am not Filipino. Kitu is Swahili for nothing, though my parents are not from Tanzania. […] two negatives yield a positive, therefore am I so named. I am Wala Kitu. That is all bullshit, with a capital bull. My name is Ralph Townsend. […] I am, in fact, a mathematician of a sort. But I use the name Wala Kitu. I study nothing."
This early introduction may well give you an inkling of what to expect.
When the story opens, Wala is enjoying a simple life in Rhode Island with his one-legged bulldog Trigo, who talks to him in his dreams. Wala's friend and colleague, Eigen Vector (who Wala introduces by saying "Like most mathematicians, including me, she fit somewhere on the spectrum"), makes irregular appearances in his life. This idyll is disrupted when "slightly racially ambiguous" billionaire and Bond villain wannabe (ahem) John Milton Bradley Sill gets in touch. Sill wants to break into Fort Knox and requires Wala's expertise in nothing.
From here, an anti-thriller commences. Wala's uncertainty about his role – is he Sill's collaborator, captive, or foe? – moves the story at breakneck speed, despite the fact that nothing really happens.
Eigen comes along for the ride and becomes bewitched by Sill, Wala ends up learning how to drive, and Trigo continues to give him advice. There are submarines and shark-infested pools, and a robotic bodyguard who is under instruction to seduce Wala, who guards his virginity like he does his dog. Cameos include the assassinator of Martin Luther King, James Earl Ray; the priest from The Exorcist; and a character named Bill Clinton ("not that Bill Clinton").
This is Everett at his most playful; even as he riffs on quantum physics he manages to hold your attention. You want to know more, the hows and whys.
Towards the end of Dr. No, a minor character makes a remark about the contributions Black people have made towards the prosperity of the United States: "We have given everything to it. I think it's time we gave nothing back." As usual, Everett is taking the piss. One gets the feeling he's taking revenge and having fun with it. CT
Greek Lessons by Han Kang
Hamish Hamilton (Penguin Australia)
South Korean novelist and poet Han Kang is best known to English-speaking readers for her novels The Vegetarian (winner of the Man Booker International in 2016) and The White Book.
Greek Lessons was first published in 2011 and has now been translated (by Deborah Smith and Emily Yae Won) and published in English. Its description sounds almost like a literary prank – but Kang gets away with it. It's the story of two characters, whose lives eventually intersect: an unnamed woman in her late 30s, who has lost the ability to speak; and an unnamed man of a similar age, who is losing his sight.
The woman's story appears in third person, and we discover that not long before she lost her voice, her mother had died, she'd been through a difficult divorce, and she'd lost custody of her son. But, she insists, to put her voicelessness down to trauma is too simple. When she was a teenager, she was also briefly mute, and there is something about language itself that pierces and horrifies her, even while she is fascinated by its shape and possibility. She is a poet, after all.
The man left Korea as a teen, moving with his family to Germany, where he lived for 17 years, before returning as an adult – enjoying the experience of return, of anonymity, sinking back into his own language. But it's all tempered by the fact he's now in a world of increasing shadows. His story is in first person because, blurred edges aside, it seems he's more willing to take up space in the world.
The woman figures she can find her words again through the precision of another language, a clear cold difficult language, which the man teaches. They meet in the classroom – and regularly misunderstand each other.
This is a novel of striking images and ideas, that forces you to savour each sentence and fully taste the practice of reading. KE
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