My Family and Other Animals

4 Saturday 26 November 2016 The Daily Telegraph The Daily Telegraph Saturday 26 November 2016 5 BOOKS FOR CHRISTMAS the son, who inflicts them on his father was a shaman, her mother Coetzee’s The Schooldays of own daughter, Henrietta. The seems to be in love with her Jesus (Harvill Secker, £17.99) Forges are a great advert for Philip half-brother, and that brother is is about a father trying to come Larkin’s dictum about exactly what possibly a psychopath. Again, what to terms with his adopted son’s your mum and dad do to you. more could you want? interest in metaphysical dance. Henry James called Tolstoy a Well, there is more if you Both are pretty impenetrable, writer of “loose, baggy monsters”; want it. Ali Smith’s Autumn yet seductive in their Morgan’s novel is certainly loose (Hamish Hamilton, £16.99) strangeness. Julian Barnes and baggy at times, and the is a delight, a typically remains on fine form richness of her prose can make it weird and witty novel with the elegant hard to digest, but it really is a that is billed as the Get 20% off The Noise of Time monstrously good book. first part of a seasonal any of these books (Jonathan Cape, £14.99) There is, as Henry James maybe quartet. David Szalay a fictional memoir of didn’t say, more than one way got some of the until Christmas the composer Dmitri to skin a cat. If Morgan shows critical recognition Go to telegraph.co.uk/ Shostakovich battling what can be done by piling it his formidable talent ChristmasBooks or call for his integrity under on, Elizabeth Strout shows the deserves for All that 0844 871 1514. Stalin. merits of cutting back. My Name Man Is (Jonathan Cape, Free p&p with all Final mention goes Is Lucy Barton (Viking, £12.99) is £14.99) and Han Kang orders over £20 to Eimear McBride’s The written in clean, crisp sentences followed The Vegetarian, Lesser Bohemians (Faber, and comes in at under 200 pages which won the latest Man Booker £16.99), the story of Eily, an but grapples just as convincingly International Prize, with Human aspiring young Irish actress with the legacy of childhood Acts (Portobello, £18.99), a novel arriving in Nineties London. In abuse. The titular character writes about the 1980 Gwangju uprising many ways it defies our seasonal about a time when she is laid up in South Korea. theme of family dysfunction, in hospital in New York and her Some of the grand old men being not about the confines estranged mother comes to visit. of literature stepped out, too. of the coop but the pleasure of Their tentative conversations Don DeLillo’s lyrical Zero K flying it. But with its fragmented, bring back memories of Lucy’s (Picador, £16.99) is about a son impressionistic sentences, it bleak, impoverished upbringing trying to come to terms with enters into the Christmas spirit in rural Illinois, some of which his billionaire father’s mission in another way: it is like reading a make you wonder whether the to be cryogenically frozen; JM very good book while very drunk. most effective path to resolution might be defenestration. Strout, though, shows the complexity of the familial ties that bind. This physically slight book packs an unexpected emotional punch. Another brilliant exploration of a mother-daughter relationship is Deborah Levy’s strange and beguiling Hot Milk (Hamish © PAOLO VENTURA © PAOLO Hamilton, £12.99), which reads like a lucid dream. Sofia escorts her FICTION watching Neighbours on a white what life is like in the womb, Flight of fancy: Colson Whitehead’s The ailing mother (whose fluctuating leather settee. from the pleasures of vicariously three frames Underground Railroad (Fleet, symptoms might well be fake) to a The novel recalls Smith’s drinking wine to the profound from The Red £14.99), winner of the American town in southern Spain where she brilliant debut – the narrator unpleasantness of being an in utero Balloon, one National Book Award for Fiction, is treated by Gomez, an eccentric attends the same school as White participant in sexual congress. of Italian also confronts racism head on. doctor (who might well be a My family and Teeth’s Irie Jones – but shows a Even less regard for taboo and photographer Caesar, a slave on a plantation quack). Meanwhile, Sofia restarts new range and ambition. She taste is shown in The Sellout Paolo Ventura’s in Georgia, tells Cora, another the life that caring for her mother has never written better. Her (Oneworld, £12.99) by Paul Beatty, Short Stories, slave, that he has a contact in had stalled. dialogue is pitch-perfect, her who won the Man Booker prize for published by the underground railroad – the Both Ottessa Moshfegh, in her comic timing masterful. But this outrageous satire on American Aperture (£45) historical network that helped debut novel Eileen (Vintage, she also delivers a sophisticated racism. The narrator’s father, it slaves escape – and persuades £8.99), and Nell Zink, in Nicotine other animals commentary on race, gender, class, transpires, was an unbalanced her to run away with him. What (Fourth Estate, £14.99), begin with celebrity and power. social scientist who subjected follows is a fantastical picaresque daughters caring for their fathers. Smith was only three years old in through the dark side of American Actually, “caring” is probably not 1978 when Ian McEwan published history, as Whitehead makes the the mot juste for the eponymous his first novel, The Cement Garden, There were needy metaphor of the underground heroine of Eileen – nor, in fact, is earning him the nickname Ian parents, feckless railroad literal. Cora flees on actual “heroine”. She is an unpleasant Macabre. He has mellowed since trains that run through secret woman, full of hatred for her The year’s finest novels proved that there is no better subject that classic of family dysfunction children – and even tunnels from state to state, each unhinged, alcoholic father, and – siblings descend into incest after racist in its own way, as she tries to addicted to laxatives and his porn for fiction than dysfunctional relations, saysDuncan White burying their mother in the cellar a vengeful foetus stay ahead of a slave hunter. collection. She stalks one of the – but Nutshell (Jonathan Cape, guards at the boys’ prison where olstoy had it right. subjects are more suited to unnamed narrator but before £16.99) his new novel, finds him his son to a series of alarming he most ambitious novel of she works, and there is a strong “All happy families fiction than family dysfunction. we discover what this is, we are back on icky form. experiments to prepare him for T the year is undoubtedly CE implication that she has committed are alike; each Novelists in 2016 offered up whisked back to her childhood “So here I am, upside down in a the racist world. Our hero ends up Morgan’s The Sport of a fairly appalling crime. unhappy family is appalling, needy or absent parents, on a council estate in north-west woman,” announces the narrator, in front of the Supreme Court for Kings (Fourth Estate, £16.99), a The father’s death in Nicotine Tunhappy in its own manipulative or feckless children, London. Her mother – a feminist a foetus. No ordinary foetus, mind trying to reintroduce slavery to sweeping Faulknerian epic set in releases a series of family secrets, way,” he wrote in a smattering of incest – and one autodidact who wears a beret and – he has sharpened his intellect his Los Angeles neighbourhood Kentucky over three centuries. It not least of which is his possession Anna Karenina. Which is one vengeful foetus. drives “an ostentatiously French on overheard podcasts and Radio and resegregate the local school. begins with an emblematic of a house in New Jersey. This way of saying that nobody is There is no better chronicler 2CV with a CND sticker placed next Four. Precocious, he eavesdrops This Swiftian satire hurtles off moment: a young boy, Henry interests Penny, his soon-to-be- interested in a fat novel about a of the modern British family than to the tax disc” – is overbearing; and finds his mother Trudy exhilaratingly from the first Forge, tries to escape punishment homeless daughter, who goes perfectly balanced family unit. In Zadie Smith. In Swing Time her father, devoted but ineffectual. conspiring with her dreadful lover sentence and delivers laugh-out- from his totalitarian paterfamilias. there, discovers that it has been a year of half-truths, post-truths (Hamish Hamilton, £18.99), her So our narrator seeks the company Claude to murder the baby’s father. loud jokes, but beneath the playful The sins of the father – a squatted by anarchists – and and downright lies, this at least fifth novel, something terrible of Tracey, a friend from dance McEwan has tremendous fun with surface burns the pure flame of spectacularly dedicated racist and decides to move in. Zink’s third remains incontestable: few appears to have happened to our class who eats Angel Delight while his amniotic Hamlet, imagining righteous rage. misogynist – are handed down to novel is properly bonkers: Penny’s Continues Books of 50 49 48 47 46 45 on page 6 The Making of The Artist Mistletoe and Lonely Boy Heyday All that Man Is the year Donald Trump by Andrés Iniesta Murder by Steve Jones by Ben Wilson by David Szalay by David Cay by Robin Stevens Johnston US journalist Johnston shows how The Barcelona midfielder, hailed as Schoolgirl high-jinks abound in The Sex Pistols guitarist details his This book puts forward the notion Booker-shortlisted, this novel tells Over the next 20 pages, the President-elect’s journey to the one of football’s greatest players, is this whodunit for children, set in life – an impoverished Sixties that the 1850s – the decade of the nine stories about nine different our critics count down White House was helped by his also one of the most enigmatic.

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