I’ve often said that I prefer to write about books that I’ve enjoyed reading. I don’t regard these posts as reviews, so I don’t feel any obligation to warn readers about books that I think they ought to avoid. Having said that, I have sometimes written in this newsletter about books that I found disappointing, and that I wouldn’t particularly recommend. Last year, I wrote about Rebecca F Kuang’s Yellowface, which I hadn’t liked nearly as much as I was expecting to, because it had a thematic element in common with Laura Lippman’s Dream Girl. Longer ago, I discussed Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon in the context of Michael Dibdin’s Dark Spectre, because I wanted to argue that Dibdin’s book was a riposte or corrective to Harris’s. But generally, writing about books I haven’t liked is not something that appeals to me.

That might be changing, however. I’ve noticed that in the last 8 or 9 months I’ve read more books than usual that I’ve been disappointed in or dissatisfied with. And I find that I do want to write something about them: not the 2,000+ word discussions that are typical of these posts but shorter notes, recording that I read the book and giving a brief summary of what it is I didn’t like about it. So I made a list of ten books that fall into this category. Two of them are Booker winners and, as chance would have it, books about which I have a bit more to say than will fit in the brief notes below. So I’m going to keep those two for the next post and devote this post to the other eight, in no particular order.

Eliza Clark, She’s Always Hungry (Faber, 2024): I enjoyed Clark’s first novel, Boy Parts, though I’m not yet sure whether I have enough to say about it to make it the subject of a newsletter post. I suspect that the best place to start with her fiction may be her second novel, Penance, which I haven’t read. I saw a secondhand trade paperback in a charity shop but I decided I’d prefer a smaller format paperback — and found She’s Always Hungry, a collection of short stories, istead. I’m sure I read an interview (but I can’t remember where) in which Clark said that the stories in this collection are more typical of her writing than either of the novels. That worries me a bit.

As a collection, this is very uneven. One story in particular, “The Shadow over Little Chitaly”, isn’t really a story at all and, though amusing, had me puzzling over what the point was. Fantasy and body horror feature strongly, so from the start I’m less well disposed towards this collection than I might be. Six of the 11 stories — that’s more than I had thought at first — could be described as naturalistic (in the sense of “not fantasy”). Two of the body horror stories, “Build a Body Like Mine” and “Shake Well” are also quite naturalistic, and the second of these is one of my favourites, though it’s about the exploitation and abuse of a 15-year-old girl by her older “boyfriend”. In general, I prefer the naturalistic stories, with the exception of “The King”, which features immortal beings living among humans on earth, and makes reference to Highlander.

Beryl Bainbridge, Sweet William (1975; Virago Modern Classics, 2013): This is the only Beryl Bainbridge book I’ve read and I’m not in a hurry to read any more on the strength of it. I remember my aunt being very enthusiastic about it sometime in the late 1970s. She said it was very funny, so I started to read her copy but soon gave up. It was only in the last 6 weeks or so that I read the whole thing, and … well, I think I can see what appealed to my aunt. Bainbridge writes in an acerbic style, with a detached and sometimes cruel humour: Katha Pollitt, in the New York Times review from 1976, calls “epigrammatic character assassination”. Pollitt adds:

It's hard to write about people who are as hollow as William, as lacking in vitality as Ann without sounding dreary and affectless oneself; it's a mark of Bainbridge's artistry that she avoids the imitative fallacy and is never less than sharply and savagely ironic.

Fair enough, but is William simply hollow, and is Ann merely lacking in vitality? I suspect that there’s more going on beneath the surface, particularly in Ann’s relationship to her mother, the dreadful Mrs Walton, than the reader is allowed to see. Ann tells her cousin, Pamela, that Mrs Walton lost all her teeth (through septicaemia) two weeks before giving birth to Ann.

“No wonder she doesn’t like you,” said Pamela. (p. 92)

Pamela and Ann don’t like each other either, but they’re civil, for the most part, whereas Mrs Walton tells her daughter to “Go to hell” (p. 115). The predominant impression I had while reading this novel was of people with very different interests, desires, personalities and expectations having to rub along together as members of families, and keeping each other in check. A story on similar lines, but which takes a much less jaundiced view of its characters, is Gerry Stembridge’s film About Adam (2001).

Bainbridge is often praised for giving the reader so much in such a small page count, but I can’t help thinking that her characters could have done with more room to breathe.

Bridget O’Connor, After a Dance: Selected Stories (Picador, 2024): Briget O’Connor died young, not long after the screenplay for Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2010), which she wrote with her husband, Peter Straughan, won a BAFTA and was nominated for an Oscar. After a Dance is a selection made from her two earlier collections of short stories published in the 1990s.

I suspect that the only thing wrong with this selection may be that I approached it with excessive expectations, having given too much weight to the very favourable reviews and publicity. It’s blurbed by Roddy Doyle (“some of the wildest, arresting, just plain brilliant short stories I’ve read in a long time”) and The Irish Times (“A storytelling genius before her time”). Following that build-up, it’s not surprising I was disappointed. I’ll certainly be reading this again, giving the stories more time to work on me. I hope I’ll like (and appreciate) them better when I do.

Jeffrey Eugenides, Fresh Complaint (2017): I don’t expect to be rereading this collection, which is the only one of Eugenides’s books that I’ve read so far. I have a copy of Middlesex but I haven’t got around to it yet, no doubt partly because I didn’t enjoy the short stories. I don’t remember very much about them, just a general feeling of disappointment. It strikes me that it’s often quite difficult to say what one doesn’t like about a novel or short story: I think I don’t like to dig too deeply into that general feeling of disappointment to try to work out what’s causing it. That’s probably one of the reasons why I prefer to write about books and stories that I view favourably.

Caroline O’Donoghue, Promising Young Women (Virago, 2018): This was O’Donoghue’s first novel for adults. When it came out, I read the free sample chapter in Apple Books and decided it wasn’t for me. I was right first time. I’ve written in this newsletter about her next two books for adults, Scenes of a Graphic Nature and The Rachel Incident. Because I liked them so much, I decided to go back and try the first novel. Though their premises and plot setups are quite different, it strikes me that Promising Young Women is in part a dry run for The Rachel Incident. The latter is not about an affair between a young woman student and her male lecturer (though the lecturer’s wife is convinced for a while that that is what’s going on), the former is about a young woman working in marketing who has an affair with her (inevitably married) boss. O’Donoghue comes up with some impressive variations on that old theme but I’m not sure that’s enough. I’m still enthusiastic about the two later novels.

Abigail Dean, Girl A (HarperCollins, 2021): A secondhand copy caught my eye in a charity shop and I thought it must be worth gambling €2 on. It was, barely. If you’re looking for a story about maltreated children needing to escape from a fanatical father, Sarah Moss’s Ghost Wall (2018) is my recommendation. (I notice blurbs by Jessie Burton prominently displayed on both Girl A and Ghost Wall.) Or, if you prefer something more sensational but still good, try Liz Nugent’s Strange Sally Diamond.

Eimear McBride, The Lesser Bohemians (Faber, 2016; paperback 2017): I had for several years steered clear of Eimear McBride’s writing because of some of the things reviewers had written about it. Jacqueline Rose in the LRB (quoted in the front matter of the paperback) is a good example.

More or less single-handed, McBride has taken us back to the experiment of modernism and ushered it into an eviscerating new phrase …

Why, I asked myself, would anybody want, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, to take us back to “the experiment of modernism”? Eventually, I came to see that I was being inconsistent. I’m not sure I ever did believe it, but I no longer think it’s useful to speak in terms of the “development” of the novel (or any literary form) or of constant progress and improvement. Academics find such ideas convenient because they’re to some extent measurable, demonstrable and examinable, but to my mind they often obscure more than they reveal. They encourage us to study the wood at the expense of the trees. But, if we let go of the idea of literary development, why shouldn’t a modernist novel be written in the twenty-first century — or a postmodernist one in the eighteenth, a metaphysical poem in the twentieth or a 12-book epic in the seventeenth?

Then I learnt that McBride disputes the notion that her work is “slavishly Joycean”. She sees it differently:

I think Joyce’s barbarism gave me the chutzpah to try. But it was never about imitating him. I remember sitting down to write [A] Girl [Is a Half-formed Thing] and feeling Joyce was on the outside. He and I are looking for different things. His work is about the extension of the human into the universe, mine is about human vulnerability and fallibility.”

So maybe it was a mistake after all to think of her work as modernist. The recognition of that likelihood gave me a good enough reason to read her second novel. It took me about 10 days to do so. The language is dense, not easily digestible, and I finished the book with a sense of relief as if I’d been freed from an onerous experience. But, though I found the novel hard work, it wasn’t difficult to make sense of, unlike McBride’s short story, “The Adminicle Exists” (in Being Various). In case I’ve been unfair to the novel, I fully intend to read it again — provided I live long enough. (And now there’s a sequel.)

Niamh Campbell, This Happy (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2020): I read and enjoyed two short stories by Niamh Campbell, “Love Many” and “An Encounter”, so I was a bit surprised to find her first novel quite dull. It’s the familiar tale of an unsatisfactory relationship between a young woman and an older man. I have little doubt that this particular example contains subtleties that I’m missing, but I’m really not inclined to go looking for them: I feel as if I’ve been reading a lot of (not very) different versions of this story. I must reread those two short stories soon, to see if I think they stand up.

I see that, of the eight books I’ve mentioned, three are collections of short stories. That strikes me as an unexpectedly high proportion, and I wonder if my problem with them is simply that I haven’t given them enough time to work on me. I’m again reminded of what Mavis Gallant said (in the Preface to her 1950 Collected Stories:

Stories are not chapters of novels. They should not be read one after another, as if they were meant to follow along. Read one. Shut the book. Read something else. Come back later. Stories can wait.

Maybe I should have let them wait a little longer. The other thing that strikes me is that, in the process of writing about these books, I have become less dismissive of some of them, more inclined to give them another chance. It’s as if having had to think about them has made me more attentive to qualities I hadn’t noticed before. So perhaps I should write more often about books I haven’t liked. Next time, on or about 18 April, I’ll be writing about the two Booker winners that I mentioned in the second paragraph above. Can you guess what they are?