This year I have completely stalled with two books that ought to be right up my street. The first was All Fours by Miranda July and the second was Banal Nightmare by Halle Butler.
I feel like such a failure! Both are books about women in or approaching mid-life, having something of a crisis. In All Fours, which I have mentioned in passing before, our heroine leaves her husband and small child, (inexplicably non-gendered), in order to take a road trip across America. But for some reason she spends the entire week at the first rest stop she comes to, 45 minutes away from her home, and embarks on an affair with a young car rental employee (male).
Some of this was good but about 3/4 of the way through it becomes terminally confusing and I’m not sure who exactly she is having sex with, or is supposed to be having sex with, and is this a dream sequence or what? I gave up.
In Banal Nightmare our heroine, Moddie, leaves Chicago and moves back to the small town she left, after a long relationship with an unpleasant possible-narcissist.
This is a perfectly okay premise but I just couldn’t follow what was going on. Butler endlessly switches between characters’ POV so you get these mini-insights into each of their minds and this is very modern, I’m sure, but it is also confusing as hell. The conversations between Moddie and her old friend Nina, who is the one who persuades her to move back to her old town, are too esoteric to follow. They are certainly realistic, they read like a transcript of a conversation that two people might really have, but it’s two people I don’t know, who don’t know me, who are talking about something I don’t have any knowledge of.
Or does the fault lie with me? I usually eat this sort of modernist female-crisis junk for breakfast. Am I losing my touch? Have I watched too many Instagram Reels and now my brain is too addled to read proper literature?
Or… are these books just not quite right? I applaud the publishers who said Yes to these female authors’ slightly batty, hyper-realistic prose, but it’s incredibly hard work for the reader. At least, for this reader.
But then, the crux of the problem struck me as I was doing the washing-up. These books, these women, these plots, the whole thing is just not relatable.
I cannot relate to it. It does not relate to me. It is not relatable. The female leads are too weird. Their actions are unfathomable, motive-less. Fleabag did and said weird things, but you could relate. Eve from Killing Eve did and said weird things but you could relate. In Everything I Know About Love, Dolly Alderton on a whim takes a taxi at 4am to Leamington Spa, which costs £200, in order to see a boy. I have never done this, but I can relate.
The non-relatableness of All Fours and Banal Nightmare cannot be because they are American, because Fleishman Is In Trouble was the most powerfully relatable book I’ve read in years. And it’s not because the lead characters in these books aren’t mid-life journalists in London, because the main character in Big Swiss, who’s just some weird dead-beat, was perfectly relatable.
I’m sure to some people the leads of All Fours and Banal Nightmare are relatable. And god knows relatable-ness is both a massive buzzword in publishing but also extremely indefinable, impossible to describe or purposefully capture. You and your prose and your characters are either relatable, or not.
So I have decided that it’s not that my brain is IG Reel mulch and it’s not that I’m losing my touch and not even that these books are bad! It’s that they are not relatable. At least, not to me.
That’s my story anyway, and I’m sticking with it. Anyway so TLDR: I need a new book. I read Precipice by Robert Harris in three days and loved it and am 1/3 of the way through Small Bomb At Dimperley and going slowly because I don’t want it to end.
But it will end, alas. So please pop your excellent reading suggestions for the group in the handy box below.
The books don’t have to be new, or fiction. Any old thing, as long as we can all, you know, relate.
So here comes the odd one. I’m currently “reading” about 8 books and go to different ones when I feel like it. Some move into the pile and others out if they don’t hit the mark. My phase now is worrying I’m getting early Alzheimer’s, menopause and all that so I have War and Peace (! late to it but it’s good. He’s a real bitch about his characters), Kairos (vg if worrying). Then The Marriage Portrait which I loved, not much story but beautifully written, The Anthropologists (wonderful). I have The Trees and The Book of Trespass to start. And have Middlemarch on Audible since I’m on a month’s free trial and it was the longest book available. Superbly read by Juliet Stevenson - I laugh out loud walking the dog. It might go into my top three best books ever.
Sandwich by Catherine Newman. I only picked it up because it was set in my favourite holiday place and assumed it was ‘just’ an airport read. How wrong I was. Sensational