Isolation

Tim Ecott has always been drawn to islands, and the seas that surround them: ‘I once ran away from England to live in the Seychelles so that I could scuba dive obsessively in the Indian Ocean,’ he writes at the beginning of Eva and the Island. ‘The tropical humidity and seductive blue water drew me into its spell.’ Gradually his love for what he calls ‘the torrid zone’ faded, and he found himself attracted to ‘the higher latitudes’. He decided to spend time on all the inhabited islands in the Faroes, including the smallest, Stora Dimun, ‘a frayed and crumbling chunk of basalt’ covering ‘just over one square mile’, which has ‘the qualities of a secret kingdom’. What better way to spend an evening in good company than eating sheep’s heads and singing?

The peculiar career of John Bumpass Calhoun (1917-95), the psychologist, philosopher, economist, mathematician and sociologist who was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and was the subject of a glowing article in Good Housekeeping, comes accompanied with more than its fair share of red flags. He studied how rodents adapted to different environments and specifically how the density of a population affects an individual’s behaviour. He collected reams of data but published little, and rarely in the mainstream scientific journals. He courted publicity, inviting journalists to draw from his studies of rats and mice apocalyptic conclusions about the future of urban humanity.

In Lore Segal’s An Absence of Cousins, Nat Cohn, a fellow at the Concordance Institute, a small college in Connecticut, browses through a children’s novel during a staff meeting and exclaims: ‘We don’t write stories like this any more. Chronic plot deficiency is our problem.’ The problem for contemporary novelists is that tightly woven plots of cause and effect belie the way their readers experience the world. Like her compatriot Elizabeth Strout in Olive Kitteridge and Olive Again, Segal addresses it by featuring a single protagonist, Ilka Weisz, a young Austrian émigrée, and various recurring subsidiary characters, in a series of closely interlinked stories.

Hell, according to Jean-Paul Sartre, is other people. Jessi Jezewska Stevens would nominate parties. Social catastrophe can stem from the invitation: ‘Email!’ she laments. ‘The way all modern tragedies begin.’ She homes in on the space between what a woman thinks and says and does. Her anti-heroines can be relied on to make wrong decisions – men, marriage, nipple-piercing and, of course, parties. The choice invariably ends in failure. Ghost Pains is a collection of 11 stories, sardonic and elegant, imbued with a sense of isolation and self-awareness. Stevens’s women throw spectacularly disastrous parties. And attend them.

The Late Americans, Brandon Taylor’s second novel, follows the lives of a group of friends living in Iowa City over the span of a year. Early on, Seamus, a poet completing his master’s degree, imagines an ‘indifferent God... squinting at them as they went about their lives on the circuits like little automata in an exhibit called The Late Americans’, and this is a fine description of the novel. Each character is the focus of a chapter, and we watch as Seamus, Fyodor, Ivan, Timo, Noah, Bea, Fatima and Daw’s lives overlap, in bars, seminar rooms and dance studios, while they negotiate their place in a world determined by their race, class and wealth.