Estrangement

I’ve never been to Tokyo, but sometimes I wonder: why bother with the plane ticket? The imagined Tokyo is more real than the actual city. For westerners, it is a place whose USP is its unreality: its irreducible strangeness, its intense Japaneseness. It’s a city where lonely souls go to bump against other lonely souls and everything is lost in translation. To spoil this fantasy with too much daylight would be to miss the point. On the surface, Bryan Washington’s Palaver isn’t in a hurry to push against these clichés. It follows an estranged mother and son who meet again in Japan many years after he has left the humidity

All writers studying their craft should be encouraged to try translation, thinks Idra Novey, the Pennsylvania-born novelist, poet and, si, translator. Working in another language confers the freedom to slip out of their own voices, developing their own tone in the process, she told one interviewer. On the strength of Novey’s third novel, Take What You Need, an adept tale about an estranged stepmother and daughter set in a fictional former steel town in Appalachia, all writers should heed her advice. In spare, affecting prose, she moves effortlessly between her two first-person narrators: sixty something Jean, and Leah, who was ten when Jean walked out on Leah’s dad, leaving a