Ten Years in the Tub (119 page)

Authors: Nick Hornby

BOOK: Ten Years in the Tub

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My sister-in-law and her family live in Wales, and (here comes the bazooka-lemon moment), like Dunthorne's characters, they have to deal with WWOOFers and polytunnels on a regular basis. WWOOFers! Polytunnels! I had never even seen those words written down before reading this novel, and I was certainly unaware that one of them began, improbably and unnecessarily, with a double
W
. (You grow otherwise recalcitrant and unhappy plants in a polytunnel, and WWOOFers, from the organization World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms, are young men and women who have an inexplicable desire to work on the land for no money.) Like
The Family Fang, Wild Abandon
isn't interested in satire, even though the world it depicts offers plenty of opportunity; both novels recognize and relish the occasional disaster, but the object is to get in close and examine what's being done to the head and the heart. And in achieving this goal, Dunthorne, who's also a poet and a frequent organizer of spoken-word events and an all-round good thing, proves that he's going to be around for the long haul. He's an elegant, accessible, and interesting comic novelist whose work, I suspect, will provide a great deal of pleasure to a great number of people for many years.

Is it unwise to rely on contemporary fiction as a source of news? Because the surprising information I gleaned from
Wild Abandon
and from Megan Abbott's
The End of Everything
is that teenage girls want to sleep with middle-aged men. (Novels have never been wrong about anything before, as far as I know. But even so, if you, like me, are a middle-aged man, then I'd advise you to double-check this before acting upon it in any way.) In
Wild Abandon
, Kate is less interested in her boyfriend, Geraint, than she is in his father, whom she attempts to seduce. And in
The End of Everything
, there is transgressive and occasionally sinister sexual chaos, most of it involving girls who have only just hit, or have been hit by, puberty. Abbott is an extraordinary writer who I discovered through the unlikely medium of Facebook, although I'm not sure exactly how. I'm currently halfway through one of her four noir thrillers,
Bury
Me Deep
, now, and it's brilliant, melancholy and feverish, and comparable to the historical fiction of Sarah Waters in the way it both respects and reinvents its genre influences.
The End of Everything
doesn't belong in that sequence: it's somewhere between conventional thriller and literary fiction, and it's psychologically subtle, gripping, and brave.

The mystery at the heart of
The End of Everything
is the disappearance of a teenage girl called Evie, and though the mystery is solved, that's not really what the novel is about. While Evie is gone, the narrator, her best friend and next-door neighbor, Lizzie, tries to make sense of it all; she provides the police with vital information in an unhelpful and deceitful way, and she worms her way into Evie's family's life and grief. She makes moves on Evie's father, even though she is only half-aware of what she's doing, and she competes with Evie's sister for attention. It seems more and more probable that Evie herself has gone off with another neighborhood father, possibly voluntarily, and meanwhile Lizzie's divorced mother is having a clandestine but shockingly observable late-night affair. Sex hangs over the suburb like some sort of tropical mist: it blurs the outlines of everything, slows everybody up, muddles thinking and feeling and the instinct for what is right and wrong. Everybody, it seems, is simultaneously both a victim and the author of his or, more frequently, her own misfortune. Only a woman could have written it, that's for sure. No man would want to suggest that girls right on the very edge of womanhood could be so complicit, so responsible for this fug of repressed sexual yearning. Abbott picks her way through this dangerous terrain with real skill: she knows what she's doing, even if her characters don't.

I had barely recovered from
The End of Everything
when I picked up Emma Forrest's memoir,
Your Voice in My Head
. There is a lot of doomed, dark sexuality in this book, too, mixed in with self-harming and suicide attempts and eating disorders and a deep, intractable sadness, and by the time I'd finished it, I had vowed never to talk to anyone who is or who has ever been a girl or young woman, just in case anything I say is misconstrued and used in evidence against me. I'm almost positive that I am not responsible in any way for Forrest's troubles, but when a young and pretty girl finds herself in trouble this deep, it's hard, as a man, not to feel obscurely guilty.

There are two men at the heart of this spare, admirably airy and riveting book. One is Forrest's therapist, the wise and loving Dr. R; the other is a Hollywood film-star boyfriend, referred to only by the letters
GH
, which stands for
Gypsy Husband
. Both men disappear on her: Dr. R dies, at the age of fifty-three, from a cancer that he hid, with extraordinary selflessness, from his patients; GH changes his mind about their intense and passionate relationship apparently during the middle of a transatlantic flight. An intensely irritating review of
Your Voice in My Head
that appeared in my newspaper of choice accuses Forrest of “showing off” about GH, but his celebrity is, of course, relevant to the affair, and to the brusqueness of its death. If I was the subject of an internet hate-campaign simply because of the fame and desirability of my partner, I'd want to write about it too.

Forrest's desperate lows seems to belong in the past, hence the memoir, but occasionally one worries about the currency of the references that meant something in the maelstromâa song by the band Beirut, Obama's inauguration, Russell Brand. The worst of the pain may be over, but it's not old. Emma Forrest is such a winning, smart writer that one hopes it gets smaller and smaller and smaller in her rearview mirror, and she goes on to write scores of novels and screenplays in which her scars are no longer visible.

Well, I like the young. Four terrific books, full of life and thought and ideas, and, interestingly, no sign of any narrative tricksiness at all. That, to me, is not necessarily a bad sign, and not just because I'm hopelessly intolerant of experimentation in my own age: these people haven't got the time to worry about any of that. They've got too much to say, too many characters to worry about, too many jokes to make. Only one of them, regrettably, contains a homemade device designed to fire fruit and vegetables at incredible speeds, but the thing about literatureâabout all artâis that you need to find your own lemon bazookas anyway.