'A modern day Jane Austen': The best Literary Fiction out now - The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong, Liquid by Mariam Rahmani, A New New Me by Helen Oyeyemi
The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong (Cape £20, 416pp)
There's not much obvious gladness around in feted young author Ocean Vuong's second novel, which tackles the treacherous promise of the American dream through the frequently addled lens of its many drug- and alcohol-ravaged characters in post-industrial Connecticut.
Much of it centres on the odd couple friendship between Hai, a 19-year-old would-be suicide victim, and the semi-senile 82-year-old Grazina, who persuaded him not to jump and whose live-in carer Hai has become while eking out a job in a local diner.
Vuong, who is also a poet, evokes the nickel and dime world of America's neglected blue collar workers with a beauty that belies its deprivation and there are some striking passages involving Grazina's harrowing experiences during the Second World War. Yet you either like Vuong's earnestly lyrical sentimentalism, or you don't. Personally I found this a rather cloying book.
Liquid by Mariam Rahmani (Doubleday £16.99, 320pp)
'Just marry rich' a friend advises the unnamed, gay, and thoroughly disillusioned Iranian/Indian post-doc narrator of this spikily funny rom-com, who only wants the security of marriage so that she can devote her mind to her studies.
So she draws up an Excel spreadsheet and sets herself the target of 100 dates and an engagement by the start of the autumn term, motivated also by her determination to avoid the marriage to her cousin her father has arranged for her in Tehran.
Yet it is in Tehran, to where she travels after her father suffers a heart attack, that this very contemporary romantic cynic starts to shift her world view.
Rahmani plays around with the tropes of the love story as a genre, but in the end can't help but succumb to them. Yet her prose is varnished with sarky asides on dating, race and class in ways that bring to mind a modern day Jane Austen.
A New New Me by Helen Oyeyemi (Faber £16.99, 256pp)
The British Nigerian novelist Helen Oyeyemi ought to be much better known. Her latest novel however screams 'commercial break out': it's the story of Kinga, who
takes on a different personality and job description depending on the day of the week.
Kinga B (Tuesdays) is a cynic; Kinga C (Thursdays) is calm and functional; Kinga D (Fridays) a borderline alcoholic. Yet the arguable harmony in which these various selves co-exist is blown wide open when Kinga A discovers a man tied up in her apartment, and none of the Kingas appear to know who he is.
An audacious, incisive and very funny novel about self knowledge in today's tech mediated age.
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