^^^^^^^^^
I would appreciate some commentary on your top four books, none of which I am familiar with. Impressive year, to say the least.
Apologies for my tardiness.
Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney. Set in New York in the 80's the protagonist is a fairly unlikeable man dealing with his failing career and failed marriage. Accompanied by another, even less likeable, man he spirals downwards for most of the book. It's a novel that would be easy to hate. I think McInerney does two things that make it work. There is a plot development that shines some light on the protagonist's behaviour. It doesn't make him likeable but at least allows him to be rooted for. The other is the novel is written in the second person. This should be irritating but instead drew me in to the novel and killed the detachment that's often present to the protagonist. It's pretty funny in places too.
The Lesser Bohemians by Eimear McBride. An 18 year old Irish student, Eilis, moves to London to attend drama school. She struggles to fit in, eventually meeting an older man, an actor just starting to become famous ,(although famous in a Timothy Spall way rather than a Colin Firth way). They meet up, embark on a doomed relationship, break up and try again. As the relationship develops the book develops & introduces the actor's character in a way that ends up turning the focus of the narrative completely. It's incredibly well done. There's a rhythm to the book that makes it unsuitable for reading in small chunks but it is absolutely worth the time & effort.
Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters. Waters' first novel. (I'm sure you're familiar with Park Chan-wook's film The Handmaiden. That was based on her third novel). A young woman in Victorian England falls in love with a male impersonator. They move together to London, fall in love, work together and become a roaring success in the music hall scene. The book's about first love and how universal that is. It's also about queerness and the struggles of coming to terms with that. (It may be strange to say that a novel is unabashedly lesbian but this book is.) It's also about the heartbreak when first love ends. That's pretty much what I knew going in and if that's all it was it'd still be a really good read, easily 4*. For me the thing that makes it so masterful is that it doesn't end there. Instead of being a first love/coming of age novel it pushes past those tropes. We follow the protagonist, Nan, as she moves on with her life and deals with the grief of a broken relationship, the loneliness of being secretly queer & the consequences of the bad decisions she makes because of that. It even has that rarest of things for literary fiction - an optimistic ending. It's my favourite book of the year, even if it does sag a little in the middle.
My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up by Stephen Elliott. A novel in stories & essentially a
roman à clef. Told as fiction, according to the author, to avoid misrepresenting anyone's sexual history it's a series of stories about a man who is into female domination. It's not in any way erotic, but it is very explicit. After the first story the stories proceed in basically linear fashion. The protagonist makes a series of poor decisions, gets into some awful relationships before ending up in a place where it's possible that he could be happy. In a lot of ways this reads as a redemption story with lots of very non-mainstream sex.
