Fiction

If you long for that far-off time when novels were prepared to be hilariously funny, vulgar, caustic, wildly politically incorrect and highly improbable you are going to love My Bags Are Big. Tibor Fischer has always been happy to write against the pieties of the age, whatever they might be. He has often been compared with Martin Amis, but he’s Amis without the pose. If anything, as he ages, he’s more like a very funny, very British Michel Houellebecq. You get the sense he really means it: he feels it; the rage is for real. His astonishing debut novel Under the Frog (1992) turned postwar Hungary into a carnival of grotesques and established the mode for a lifetime of books that treat plot as scaffolding for his riffs and reflections on life, the universe and everything.

In ‘Ward 9’, the central story of Will Self’s lauded debut collection, The Quantity Theory of Insanity (1991), it is posited that a society can only contain a finite supply of sanity, and that when it comes to marbles we’re all playing a zero-sum game. His latest novel suggests a limited amount of morality must exist in a world where the avaricious prosper and the meek inherit the debts of those who live unscrupulous lives. In the milieu of the book, these debts are mainly school fees, coke bills and the cost of renting an Italian villa for two weeks every summer.

Can Xue is an oddity in the landscape of world literature. Greeted mostly with bewilderment or indifference in her native China, her novels have gained a following among a certain type of erudite western reader over the past few decades, leading to an annual flurry of Nobel speculation and more works in English translation than nearly any other living Chinese author. The writing can be hard to enjoy. It often takes the form of avant-garde fairy tales populated by nameless characters who genially accept unsettling, inexplicable occurrences around them. When this works, as in last year’s gloriously strange Mother River, you get the disorientating feeling that you are the one who has gone insane, not the characters.

I think I’d be pretty hostile if I met my doppelganger – living proof of my mediocrity. My fragile ego even balks at being told I’m reminiscent of someone else. But, drawn as they are to the uncanny, authors just love doppelgangers. In As If, Isabel Waidner makes a playful contribution to the literary tradition, following in the footsteps of Dostoevsky, Kafka and Beckett. Waidner is the German-British author of four previous novels, including Sterling Karat Gold, which won the Goldsmiths Prize. They are non-binary, and known for experimental writing. Many recent novels, such as Miranda July’s All Fours, imagine middle-aged women abandoning their lives, but lately the male midlife crisis, while going strong in society, has been somewhat neglected in fiction – until now.

Lionel Shriver is a first-rate storyteller. And yet… A Better Life is a satire on the immigration problem that particularly faces the US. All the clichéd arguments on both sides of the debate are laid bare. In fact, the whole novel is a cliché. Yet clichés come into existence because their substance is what everyone is talking about. Shriver’s problem is that her plot and her characters can seem like ciphers for her polemical views; they dominate the novel’s form. Gloria Bonaventura, a 62-year-old divorcée, lives with Nico, her 26-year-old, Fordham educated, unemployed layabout son, in a Queen Anne mansion in a fashionable part of New York.

Ian McGuire’s previous historical novels, The North Water (2010) and The Abstainer (2020), tightly plotted literary thrillers with Shakespearean bodycounts, embodied the Schopenhauerian creed that to be human is to suffer. His latest, White River Crossing, is no different. Canada, 1766. A pedlar appears at Prince of Wales Fort, a Hudson Bay Company trading post on the Churchill River, bearing a fistful of gold ore. The chief factor, Magnus Norton, dispatches his deputy, John Shaw, his nephew, Abel Walker, and Tom Hearn, first mate of the fort’s whaling sloop, on a 500-mile expedition to the Barren Grounds, deep in the subarctic tundra, to locate the source of the treasure. They’re guided by a native Indian chieftain, Datsanthi, and his family.

In the Kolkata of Megha Majumdar’s gripping second novel, set over seven days in an unspecified ‘ruined year’, restaurants deliver meals to the rich under cover of darkness. Others in the pestilent, depleted city do what they must to feed their loved ones – storming ration shops, looting the pantries of the well-to-do, even battering old women for a fistful of green beans. A Guardian and a Thief follows Majumdar’s virtuosic debut, the political fiction A Burning. It opens a week before the flight that is meant to take a woman, known only as Ma (Bengali for ‘Mother’), along with her young daughter and widower father, from Kolkata to Michigan, where Ma’s husband, a research scientist, awaits them. In the meantime, the child needs to eat.