You’ll need a cup of tea after reading these: The best Retros out now – FISH TALES by
FISH TALES by Nettie Jones (Virago Modern Classic £16.99, 262pp)
Out of print for 40 years, it’s the sheer energy of this short novel that overwhelms.
It follows black American Lewis Jones as she navigates the decadent worlds of 1970s New York and Detroit in a haze of champagne, cocaine, Valium and sexual excess, funded by her doctor ex-husband.
Befriended by Kitty, a flamboyant hustler, Lewis likes to party and control, manipulate yet play the victim – until she meets Ivy League paraplegic Brook and becomes obsessed with him.
This cat-and-mouse game ends in frenzied tragedy, like a roller coaster ride crashing into the buffers. You’ll need a calming cup of tea afterwards.
Decadence and Debauchery in Detroit
ALL THAT IS by James Salter (Picador £10.99, 400pp)
Sex is also a theme in this brilliantly sketched portrait of Philip Bowman, young veteran of the naval war in the Pacific, who wangles a place at Harvard and ends up as a fiction editor (lots of good in-jokes about writers here).
Over 40 years, characters come and go: his single mother, a rich, horsey Southern first wife, a British lover, a surprisingly duplicitous live-in partner and various male friends and colleagues.
Like a kaleidoscope, their influence on him swirls and builds as he never quite connects, other than through (rather graphic) sex with the women, culminating in an act of shockingly cruel revenge.
It’s clever, witty and scalpel-sharp in its tracing of post-war America.
THE IMAGE OF HER by Simone de Beauvoir (Vintage £14.99, 200pp)
It’s 1960s Paris and advertising copywriter Laurence lives a life of wealthy, bourgeois ease with her two daughters, architect husband, adored father and self-obsessed mother.
Laurence also has a lover, but when her elder daughter starts asking what the point of everything is, it triggers a crisis.
Laurence has a history of depression, but as she battles with her child’s questions, she confronts the emptiness of her life: all material superficiality and quest for perfection, but utterly lacking her own voice.
How can she protect her daughter from her own mistakes? Beautifully written, what surprises is how very modern this feminist rite of passage feels.