Dean Nicholas
Synthetic fallacy - The Clothes on their Backs, Man Booker Shortlist 2008
Narrative accoutrements – Vivien’s love interest, for example – don’t entirely convince and, in this case, seem thrown in merely as tools to craft the novel’s climax. Irritating, too, is Grant’s habitual ticking off of London landmarks like a tourist’s itinerary, a common conceit with novels set in the city, but one no less annoying for its frequency.
The pinnacle of matriarchy - (Orange Prize for Fiction 2008 Shortlist)
Mendelson keeps a firm hand on her style. The prose is economical, and characters are stung off the page with sharply aimed epithets – Frances, for example, is described by her mother as ‘a particularly disappointing segment of tangerine’.
Granta’s second century
Much of the coverage of Granta 101 has highlighted the title’s anachronism at a time when Britain seems to value vacuous celebritism and disdain anything perceived as ‘intellectual’, worrying whether such a ‘highbrow’ title can survive without softening its intimidating stance. Yet surely that is the point.
Will he, won’t he?
Diaz’s narrator masters a fabulously authentic idiolect, combining phrases of Spanish (refreshingly unitalicised) whose onomatopoeic meanings are often clear but occasionally opaque to the non-speaker, whilst touching on – but never quite becoming – the stereotypical streetwise Noo Yawk-based Latino.
Over
Forster is unable to sustain interest in this nuclear family fallout through the whole novel. Once the details of Miranda’s death are revealed, the momentum evaporates. Forster’s writing throughout is clean and crisp, resisting melodramatic perorations, but the lack of narrative strand does lead to dry, often lifeless text.
