Category Archives: Fiction

March 19, 2025 · 12:56 am

All Fours: I don’t know what to tell you. It’s either very good or I can’t tell because of all 18+ content

My mum was not wrong when she told me Miranda July’s All Fours was ‘very graphic’ and ‘shocking.’ She was kind enough to suggest that someone of my generation might not be as scandalized, but honestly? It was pretty graphic – pushing the bounds of vulgar. I guess to see where the line is between vulgar and beautiful?

And maybe someone of my generation was even more scandalized because boy does it make menopause look like A Ride I Would Rather Not Take.

So backing up: unnamed protagonist heads out on a road trip she doesn’t really want to take because she wants to prove to herself (and her husband and friends) that she is the kind of person who wants to take a road trip. She makes it half an hour outside the city before camping out in a motel for three weeks.

I have to admire her resolve to abandon any pretence with herself. She knows she’s not going to leave the motel – having fallen (in the weirdest possible way) totally in love with this random man, Davey, that she locks eyes with in a gas station parking lot. A series of further weirdness follows including a 20K redecoration of the motel room orchestrated by Davey’s wife. A scene with a tampon that will live forever etched in my mind.

And then suddenly it got pretty boring. She gets back from her road trip and is very sad about no-more Davey, and very sad about getting old and eventually dying, and being in perimenopause, and boy did I lose interest. Not that I was hooked for the vulgarity, but more for the weirdness, the out of place and timeness. And back in LA and in her regular life it was just… not as compelling. And drawn out with the angst.

Anyway, she ends up in a functional open marriage with her genderless child living on the profits of her art, so you know, really leaning in to the typical reader’s experience.

All that said there are some spectacular scenes of dancing. For those of you persuaded dancing is a spiritual activity – and I know there are plenty of you – the novel has some very moving scenes of the connection dance allows. Said by one extremely bad and energetic dancer.

Oh it does have extraordinary good writing.

Should you read it? I don’t know? Maybe? Probably so you can be hip and pretend like you weren’t floored by the scene X Y and Z – all extreme and all intense. Actually that’s a good enough reason – read it because rare to find a book that makes you feel this much, even (especially?) when that feeling is surprise, disgust, desire, lust, shock – all from reading! Books, man. They are something else.

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March 15, 2025 · 10:14 pm

Listen for the Lie: Such a fun audiobook

If I had read Amy Tinera’s Listen for the Lie instead of listening to it as an audiobook I’m not sure I’d have liked it so much. As it was, the audio version had the podcast-within-the-novel fully narrated with ridiculous podcast theme music and I got utterly absorbed in a novel that was a true-crime podcast that was also a mystery novel. Like look forward to my commute kind of fun.

Oh don’t get me wrong. The book is ridiculous. Lots of clenched jaws and amnesia and cellphones going missing at just the right moment to make the plot plausible and men rescuing women who don’t need rescuing but like it all the same. Very, very silly.

And if you can put aside (as all true crime podcasts ask you to do) that there’s a murder motivating the romp through investigations and red herrings and sordid backstories and *gasp* revelations then you can just have a great little read.

In sum: middling to poor writing, barely any complexity to characters, and an all out absorbing plot especially so when in audio. Cue it up for your next long car trip and you won’t be sorry.

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March 11, 2025 · 4:56 pm

The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus: Not Memorable, but Also Fine

I read Emma Knight’s The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus in nearly one sitting, which is a good thing because the characters are so pleasant as to be extremely forgettable, and the plot – which couched as mystery/romance/wealthy-people-doing-rich-things should have been captivating – was slow to engage.

(On the forgettable characters: the first 20 odd pages were almost impossible for me to sort out as characters get introduced every six sentences, each with something (apparently) unique for the reader to try to latch on to, but let me tell you, just telling me a character is ‘quirky’ does not a memorable character make. So either make yourself a little chart or trust me that it really doesn’t matter if you know who Fergus or Charlie are because they are both unimportant and underdeveloped).

Our protagonist, Pen, is tackling a few things: what happened that ruptured her parents’ marriage? Is sex really all that people say it is (and when should you have it? with who? for what reason?)? what ties families together if not only blood?

Mostly these questions turn out to have fairly straightforward and boring answers: parents marriage: infidelity (isn’t it always); sex: it depends and whatever you want to do or not do is great as long as you’re consenting and choosing; family: family can be about blood relationships, but that is always an insufficient condition for Family, and family doesn’t have to be about blood relationships. There’s a vehn diagram in there for chosen family for sure.

The fun parts are descriptions of the big Scottish estate where most of the plot unfolds. Lots of misty walks through overgrown gardens.

And the best part for me were the moments where friendship is (lightly) explored. Pen’s best friend Alice is with her and has been her best friend since forever. This kind of friendship is held up as some kind of unassailable fortress of knowing-and-being-known. As if the sheer length of time they have been friends is proof of the power of that trust. And here I quibble. I do dearly love the friends I have been friends with for a long, long time (I see you S. and C. and J. and J.) and yes, there’s something to be said for a person who has chosen you to be around for years and years (something quite different from a sibling who often has no choice or a partner who chooses you for a different kind of love and usually well after your identity has solidified). But Pen and Alice seem to think that length of friendship alone is sufficient justification for depth. And maybe that’s true? I don’t know, I’m not sure it is, but perhaps the real complaint is that the book makes no effort to complicate or question this – instead just: Old Friends Always Friends.

Anyway, I wouldn’t bother with this one, but you do you.

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February 24, 2025 · 3:09 am

The Wren, the Wren: It might be brilliant; it might be boring

Honestly? I’m not sure. There were moments reading Anne Enright’s The Wren, the Wren that I was convinced it was genius. Sublime writing that catches you and holds you. Simple thematic question – what do we owe our inheritance, what do we blame the fathers and men. Rich, rich, imagery and poetry and playful form.

And then moments where I just didn’t care very much what happened to the characters, or couldn’t remember who a character was talking to or why, or whether an image was meant to be Significant or whether it was just there to prove the great writing.

I could let it percolate another few days and maybe I’d be clearer. But I think if I do the likelihood I forget the book entirely is high. There’s just not much there to hang on to; instead, a lot of imagery, a lot of certainty it is Very Beautiful Writing.

So sure – it won the Booker, and – as I Keep On Saying – it’s quite beautiful. And there are scenes I think might haunt me. But would I recommend it? Goddddd. I just don’t know.

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