Book reviews roundup: Jacobson’s savage satire; McInerney’s miracles; memories of Sacks
Two eagerly anticipated and very different novels divided critics this month. Howard Jacobson’s Pussy was written in two months in “a fury of disbelief” after Donald Trump’s US election victory, and is set in a fictionalised world in which spoiled Prince Fracassus rules. “Flawed but fascinating” wrote Anita Sethi in the i, summing up many critics’ feelings. “At its best, the book brilliantly portrays a world in which language and the complexity of ideas that it can convey have been devalued … ” The Observer’s Andrew Anthony also accentuated the positives, finding “many aesthetic pleasures to be had in Pussy. If Trump’s presidency is a source of continuing anxiety, then among its very few benefits is that it is has moved one of our finest comic writers to write an elegantly savage satire of a man who defies satire.” But this satirising of the unsatirisable vexed some. “The more you share its premises, the more you wish this satire had sharper edge. Fracassus’s unsavoury grotesqueness never trumps Trump’s,” wrote Peter Kemp in the Sunday Times, while the Independent’s Lucy Scholes felt “inclined to wonder what [Jacobson’s] hurry was. From a novelist of his pedigree ... I wanted something more considered.”
Lisa McInerney’s The Blood Miracles is the follow-up to her Baileys women’s fiction prize-winning debut The Glorious Heresies and focuses on that novel’s drug-dealing teenage anti-hero. For Arifa Akbar in the Evening Standard, “McInerney is brilliant at colloquial dialogue and she knows her characters inside out … [she] writes with delicious irreverence and her fiction in this book has a fast, filmic quality. But she might learn from Trainspotting and its subsequent spin-offs that if the same story is repeated too often, it becomes less, not more, than it was.” The Times’s Laura Freeman was sad not to see more made of the novel’s tender moments, but announced: “the book becomes a face-off, knife-off, spliff-off between rival gangsters … If you don’t like this sort of thing – and it makes me clutch my pearls – then The Blood Miracles is not for you. If, however, you like Trainspotting, Peaky Blinders, Guy Ritchie and Quentin Tarantino then this is a rackety, kinetic, hold-your-attention-at-gunpoint book.” Hephzibah Anderson in the Mail on Sunday felt that “some convoluted double-dealing causes book and hero to lose momentum, but McInerney writes with enviable verve, swagger and humour”. The most positive review came from Hilary A White in the Irish Independent: this is “delectable and vigorously entertaining ... a rollicking night in”. There was no lack of tenderness in Insomniac City, Bill Hayes’s memoir of his life in New York with the writer and neurologist Oliver Sacks. “It’s a romantic book, and a sad one … We see a Sacks we have never seen before, but are also comforted that he is exactly as we thought him: boyish, brilliant, curious and kind,” wrote Louis Wise in the Sunday Times. The New York Times’s Christopher Bram found it “very good about the day-to-day life of the couple” but lacking the distance to show Sacks as the “extraordinary talent he was: cerebral, tender, alien, mysterious”. But for Katie Law in the Evening Standard, “This memoir is really a eulogy to Sacks, to New York and to its inhabitants. It is also a wonderfully tender and touching portrait of the love and happiness two people were lucky enough to find together.”