by Ed Simon
Alternating with my close reading column, every even numbered month will feature some of the novels that I’ve most recently read, including upcoming titles.
A novel, like a symphony, must be conveyed through a particular artistry of time. Unlike a painting, or even a short lyric poem which gestures towards narrative, a novel must dwell in it. Even a novel where “nothing happens” must by the nature of the form make its art happen through the progression of a past into the future, but it in the complexities of that transition – the roundabouts, the flashbacks, the shifting, the slip-streaming, the ruminations, and the foreshadowing – which makes extended prose so adept at conveying the ambiguous feeling of time itself. Within a novel, time can be treated as anything but simple, so that the past can find itself perennial; the future can be a matter of precognition; the present an eternity (or, conversely, nothing at all). “Where there is no passage of time there is also no moment of time, in the full and most essential meaning of the word,” writes the Russian Formalist critic Mikhail Bakhtin in his The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. “If taken outside its relationship to past and future, the present loses its integrity, breaks down into isolated phenomena and objects, making of them a mere abstract conglomeration.” The abstraction of the present is what some mediums exult at – whether lyric or painting – but a novel can’t help but exist amidst the texture of time, its warp and warble, its nicks and snares.
The Spoiled Heart by British novelist Sunjeev Sahota masterfully interrogates time, in particular time’s daughter of memory and its cruel son trauma. Published in April, Sohata’s novel is set in industrial Chesterfield, a small hamlet in Derbyshire. Focalized around the local union leader Nayan Olak, though narrated by his occasional childhood friend Sajjan Dhanoa who is equal parts roman a clef and Nick Carraway, The Spoiled Heart is set in a realistic England distant from many Americans’ country house fantasies. Working-class and multicultural, tough and often despairing, this is the England not necessarily of Blenheim and Wentworth Woodhouse, or even of red phone-booths, double-decker buses, and fish and chips, but rather of kebab houses and labor politics, strikes and stark class divisions. Nayan, the son of Indian Sikh immigrants, suffered hideous trauma twenty years before, when as a young man barely into his 20s a seemingly accidental fire in his parent’s High Street shop killed his mother and young son. The tragedy destroys Nayan’s marriage so that in between caring for his bitter and demented father, he ultimately dedicates his life to Unify, a union representing laborers across a variety of industries. Having decided to run for the presidency of Unify, Nayan is challenged by his colleague and former friend Megha Sharma. Where Nayan is a class-essentialist leftist of the Corbynite variety, Sharma – also the daughter of Indian immigrants, albeit from a well-heeled class – is an adherent to an identity-focused liberalism. Much of the drama from The Spoiled Heart derives from the ideological and personal friction between these two.
But were Sahota’s novel only a means of allegorizing post-Brexit and post-covid fissures in the British left it wouldn’t be nearly as fascinating, and moving, as it is. Because to return to my theme, The Spoiled Heart is powerfully adept at conveying the psychological distances of time; the ways in which a hideous night from twenty years ago can be closer to Nayan than the present, the way secrets hidden have a way of reemerging. This is particularly true with Helen Fletcher, a prodigal daughter of Chesterfield who attended high school with Nayan and left under mysterious circumstances, returning home with her adolescent son who was dismissed from a beloved cooking job at a posh school over what was misperceived as a racial aggression. Sahota’s characters exist in the present but live in the past, a combination that makes the future perilous. “A real blast from the past,” the novelist narrator Sajjan says of Nayan, “and between raising glasses and buying rounds, whether standing at the urinal or at the roar of the hand-dryer, his name kept on at me like torchlight in my eyes.” Sahota can breezily code-switch throughout The Spoiled Heart, a novel set between both cultures and classes, that’s both parochial and cosmopolitan. This is a novel set among the northern industrial working class, and it’s about them insomuch as Sahota is aware of what it means to work a full shift, to have to grab a takeaway curry on the way home, pass out in front of the telly, and have to get up and do it all again the next day. But it’s not exactly a proletarian novel and it’s certainly not didactic. Nayan and Megha may promote certain political positions, but they’re not stand-ins and the novel isn’t an allegory. What’s more important than any social, economic, or cultural critique is the way in which memory and time impact upon a person, how one is to live with the multitude of heartbreaks and tragedies that can constitute a life. Watch this one for the Man Booker Award.
Northern England was also the setting for Natasha Brown’s clever novella Universality, another book which looks at the complexities and hypocrisies, the pieties and cravenness of Britain in the 2020s. Composed as a series of short pieces rendered in varying genres – from a glossy magazine article to an interview – and narrated by various characters, Universality is focused on the ambiguities around a single, spectacularly violent event a year before whereby the leader of a vaguely anarchic commune squatting on the grounds of a Yorkshire country house is bludgeoned in the head with a gold bar. Examining the contradictions of memory and perspective, the various sections allow the reader to Rashomon-like consider the fallibility of different accounts. Brown does a good job of crafting her characters, which include Hannah, a gig-economy freelancer who derives some fame and security in writing the magazine article that begins Universality, the finance-bro Richard whose estate was where the gold-bar-braining occurred, and most interesting of all, the noxious “anti-woke” columnist Mirriam “Lenny” Leonard, who cynically fashions herself into a right-wing champion of the English white working class, and seems to be a pastiche of a Lionel Shriver-type. Universality is very much a novel of the now, where everything from post-Occupy utopianism to jaded finance-bro nihilism, millennial precarity and the economy of attention jostle together. “A gold bar is deceptively heavy,” writes Hannah, and Universality is an attempt at weighing that heaviness with all that it represents in terms of history and class, the past and the present. The result doesn’t always completely hang-together. In someways, Brown’s novel reads like the outline of a more ambitious attempt. Nonetheless, Universality is worth it for the character sketches alone.
Hannah, who is hungry for the creative acclaim that is denied her cohort of millennial scribblers, isn’t dissimilar to the main character in Juliet Lapidos’ Talent. Like Hannah, Anna is a smart and talented young woman who finds that the present’s current arrangements don’t reward being smart and talented in the manner that she expected. And, like Hannah, Anna can’t get out of her own way, mired in neurotic self-regard, the later sustaining herself on Pop-Tarts and rancor. Talent is a novel very much attuned to the experience of time right now, where the present has been abolished in favor of the immediate past and the immediate future, but if “you’re doing something because you’re expecting a reward, then you’re not living in the here and now and you won’t enjoy the action itself,” a bit of cliched wisdom that Anna might intellectually understand but emotionally can’t grasp. A 29-year-old ABD at the New England Collegiate University, which seems to be a mediocre stand-in for Lapidos’ alma matter of Yale, Anna is in the seventh year of her PhD, floundering on not just her research but her inspiration.
That happens to be the subject of her dissertation, an examination of the ways in which authors and cultures have conceived of inspiration, whether from divine intervention or socio-material forces, whereas the master-procrastinator Anna ironically thinks that literature is simply a matter of putting the work in. Close to being cut off by the department, Anna must entirely rethink the focus of her work, with her adviser mandating that she has to choose a writer to case study. A bit of kismet when she meets the eccentric niece of the once-celebrated novelist Friederick Langley, a kind of cross between J.D. Salinger and Donald Bartheleme, who after several well-regarded short stories went silent for the last two decades of his life before dying in a car accident. Helen Langley, the author’s niece, claims to have access to additional writings of her uncle which Anna pursues for the raw material of her dissertation, becoming more intertwined with her older, troubled friend with disastrous consequences for the grad student. Either a thriller in the guise of a comedy or its opposite, Talent is surprisingly funny and always engaging, though as with Universality the whole attempt doesn’t quite hang together as fully as the reader would want.
Part of my own required reading this summer has been either a return to, or a visit for the first time, many of the 21st century “canonical” novels enumerated as among the best by recent lists from The New York Times to The Guardian. A novel which I shockingly missed when it came out is Jennifer Egan’s rapidly-approaching-classic status A Visit from the Goon Squad, whose unconventional narrative shifting in and out of the past, present, and future and across perspectives is an exhilarating account of how time builds up like plaque in the heart. Much critical tsuris has been expended on how to categorize A Visit from the Goon Squad – as novel or collection of short stories. Every chapter in Egan’s book is interconnected, the characters to varying degrees being associated with punk rock record producer and president of Sow’s Ear Records Bennie Salazar and his kleptomaniac assistant Sasha Blake. Yet any one of the chapters could be read in isolation, as indeed several of them were first published in Harper’s or The New Yorker.
Nonetheless, these stories cohere together, because each section illuminates a plot point or a character from the previous. Minor figures reappear a hundred pages later, throw-away lines in one chapter become the central focus in the next, details begin to accrue around characters only superficially sketched earlier on but made full figures later. A Visit from the Goon Squad is, its own way, the rare and powerful novel which teaches you how to read it. As a result, Egan’s novel becomes a collective portrait of her characters, an examination of the way in which people both intertwine and separate lives and how we’re so often unknown even to each other. “I looked down at the city,” recalls Scott, a former bandmate of Bennie’s espying his ex-friend’s newfound fortune. “Its extravagance felt wasteful, like gushing oil or some other precious thing… I thought: If I had a view like this to look down on every day, I would have the energy and inspiration to conquer the world.” If there is anything central to A Visit from the Goon Squad it’s this ever remunerative, regenerative potential in every single second, but the strange tragedy that that potential is only ever deferred.
Another classic that I missed earlier was Jeffrey Eugenides Great American Doorstopper Middlesex. Having read and enjoyed both The Virgin Suicides and The Marriage Plot, I’ve become a Eugenides-completist, finding Middlesex to deservedly be his masterpiece. Published 23-years-ago, one wonders if the story of intersex narrator Caliope “Cal” Stephanides would be published in 2025, the treatment of its subject sometimes jarring to contemporary sensibilities, with Eugenides status as a cis-het man writing a character who transitions from being a woman-to-a-man interpreted as exploitative or appropriative. As it is, we’re lucky then that it was published in 2002, for Cal, along with three generations of the extended Stephanides family, Greek immigrants from Turky who live first in Detroit and then the tony suburb of Gross Pointe, are an evocative, beguiling, and fascinating family.
Beyond the issue of gender, Middlesex is an exploration of American identity across time, its five-hundred pages examining the immigrant experience, industrialization and post-industrialization, and how family secrets disappear and reappear, a novel that encompasses everything from the Turks’ immolation of Smyrna to the floor of a Ford plant, Castro District peep shows to Detroit’s race riots. Both the Great Detroit Novel and the Great Greek American Novel, Middlesex is a borderline hubristic attempt all the more fantastic for how it succeeds on its own terms. “Can you see me? All of me?” asks Cal. “Probably not. No one ever really has,” though that’s true for everyone. Sometimes categorized as written in a style that critic James Wood slandered as “hysterical realism,” it’s true that Middlesex is a novel of fecundity, bloated and stuffed with details and descriptions, anecdotes and histories, but that is its magnetic pull, a novel that is a universe. Inheritor to the first-generation style of a Philip Roth or a Saul Bellow, Middlesex is a specifically American novel in the best sense of that term.
The final novel that I (re)read these past few months is by contrast to Middlesex a very English novel, but as with Eugenides’ one that perhaps needed to be written by someone whose identity places them at the national margins. In making a list of the greatest British novels of the past fifty years, you could do a lot worse than topping it with Nobel Laurette Kazuo Ishiguro’s incandescent work Remains of the Day. Born in Nagasaki but raised in Surrey, Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day pivoted from the Japanese subjects of his earlier works to an almost preposterously English subject as his stiff-upper-lipped narrator, the butler Stevens, considers his life’s work in his dwindling days. By barest description, this sounds like the stuff of a P.G. Wodehouse novel, of Downton Abbey, but Remains of the Day is neither romance nor nostalgia, but rather a heart-wrenching display of the ways in which a rigid class system can colonize one’s mind, of how dedication to a cause larger than yourself, or convincing yourself that that’s what you’re doing, can waste a whole life, though there is a chance for some salvation until the moment when you’re in the ground.
Stevens is a beautifully realized figure, the rare narrator who is unreliable to himself. In recounting a life of service dedicated to Lord Darlington, a dilettantish meddler in national affairs with a Mosleyite streak, Stevens is a man only half-actualized, a human more uniform than man. As he reflects on his tenure at Darlington Hall while road-tripping to Weymouth to meet Miss Kenton, a former colleague whom he is clearly in love with, Stevens gives us the straightforward accounting of the past, but as filtered through his own occluded understanding, his own carefully constructed delusions, until a moment subtle and heartrending, quiet and beautiful, he realizes what all of the past has amounted to. “Perhaps, then, there is something to his advice that I should cease looking back so much,” says Stevens after a brief exchange with a friendly stranger on a bench overlooking the sea, “that I should adopt a more positive outlook and try to make the best of what remains of my day.” Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day demonstrates that no life is perfect, but that some novels are.
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Ed Simon is the editor of Belt Magazine, a staff-writer for LitHub, a columnist at 3 Quarks Daily, and Public Humanities Special Faculty in the English Department of Carnegie Mellon University. The author of over a dozen books, his Devil’s Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain was named one of the “Best Books of 2024” by The New Yorker.
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