Laugh out loud literary fiction: Service by John Tottenham, Borderline Fiction by Derek
Service by John Tottenham (Serpent’s Tail £14.99, 336pp)
It’s hard to know whether Sean, the pathologically underachieving narrator of this debut novel, hates himself more than his customers.
A failed journalist and wannabe novelist staring down the barrel of middle age, he works at a book store in a formerly down at heel, now hideously gentrified part of LA, dealing with insufferable queries concerning the gluten content of the muffins sold in the cafe and whether the bookshop has a restroom.
He tells customers talking on their phones to ‘take it outside’ and puts down the phone on those ringing to check if a certain book is in stock.
His Yelp reviews are not favourable, and even his easygoing boss is getting worried, until a new co-worker offers to help edit his final literary effort.
Full of whipsmart lines on the drudgery of retail, the futility of art and the hateful lifestyles of hipsters, Service is laugh-out-loud funny and nearly always bang-on true.
Borderline Fiction by Derek Owusu (Canongate £18.99, 304pp)
There’s a mini industry in young black men writing poetically about love and sex. Owusu’s second novel shares an overlap with Caleb Azumah-Nelson’s Open Water.
Both are soulful examinations of a young black man’s inner world, focusing on the gap between posturing masculinity and the often more tender reality.
Owusu’s novel is also formally ambitious, using a split time frame to alternate between his protagonist’s accounts of falling in love as a scrappy 19-year-old gym trainer and a considerably more poised, reflective 25-year-old university student.
The sense of disassociation is so explicit that the two narrators could almost be two entirely different people, and while many of his meandering sentences need a good haircut, Owusu remains an intriguing poet of young black male dreams.
The Wax Child by Olga Ravn (Viking £14.99, 192pp)
This self-consciously literary novel is not for those who dislike books written in densely poetic fragments, and which rely on a certain dream-like ambiguity for effect.
But if you are a fan of this approach, then The Wax Child offers much to savour in its beautifully imaginative take on a familiar literary subject: the witch trials that swept through Europe in the 17th century.
Set in Denmark, it’s written from the perspective of a tiny beeswax doll, whose maker and owner Christenze is accused by a noble woman of witchcraft after the latter suffers a series of still births, and is thrown into a dungeon to await trial.
Drawing on folklore, superstition, gossip and historic truth, frequently blending the borders between all four, The Wax Child weaves its strange awful magic like a spell.