CS Lewis’s adage that we read to know we are not alone may have become a banal observation, but being inside a character’s interior struggles while they navigate personal crises with all their human flaws is one of the novel’s perpetual strengths.
Four of the new year’s most accomplished debut novelists, Sara Freeman, Renée Branum, Ella Baxter and Jakob Guanzon, take us back to this elemental function of literature. Poverty, grief, family ties, lack of self-knowledge – their heroes variously face them all. That our sympathies are engaged so skilfully and hope so adeptly snatched from the jaws of defeat is proof of the strength of these new writers’ storytelling, and the sincerity of their enterprise: chipping away at the truth of how people are, how they behave and what they feel.
Australian artist and writer Ella Baxter has admitted to being in a “valley of grief” when she wrote New Animal (Picador, £14.99), in which Aurelia, a young funeral parlour cosmetician in New South Wales, hurls herself into the shame and tawdry exploitation of the BDSM scene after her mother dies. Baxter is fascinated with the female body, which “trots everywhere with you like an indebted lover”, and how it assimilates extreme emotions. Aurelia investigates, through often savage humiliations, how far she can use sex as a violent displacement activity.
Self-destructive anti-heroines are in vogue, but what Aurelia’s story makes clear is how under-represented female sexuality still is. A key scene in which Aurelia first tries out the position of a “dom”, rather than a “sub”, is a direct challenge to the reader’s conception of what is admissible sexual behaviour for a woman – even more so as it is partly played for laughs.
By the end, Aurelia counter-intuitively finds a renewed bond with her body after placing it under duress. The novel closes with her preparing a stillborn baby girl for a funeral, prompting a reflection on the power of the female body, with its almost infinite capability to reabsorb pain, “like a mechanical ocean recycling its own salt”.
A stillborn child also lies at the centre of Canadian writer Sara Freeman’s Tides (Granta, £12.99), in which 37-year-old Mara flees to a New England coastal town in the wake of losing her baby. While her behaviour is in no way as extreme as the protagonist of New Animal, her plight feels more precarious.
With little money, she lives as an itinerant before getting a job in a local wine store and embarking on an affair with its owner. The seaside town for Mara feels less like a place of possible renewal, a fresh tide, than a pull toward death, where after losing a child “you go along with her”. “You won’t be happy until you’ve burned the whole house down,” she recalls a friend telling her. Is redemption even a possibility? Here, as in New Animal, deliverance is far from guaranteed.
If Freeman lacks Baxter’s leavening humour, she makes up for it with a honed lyricism: “When she pictures it – herself in this town forever – it reminds her of a silent movie she once saw in which a man, shot dead on a sidewalk, steps out of the outline the police chalked, looks down at his own figure, then, satisfied with the line, settles back down, closes his eyes, dies all over again.”
