In some ways 2024 has been good for Great Britain. After fourteen years, Tory rule finally collapsed under its own incompetence. (The jury’s still out on human parsley Keir Starmer.) The UK’s soft power is ubiquitous across stateside media. There’s Charli XCX entertaining the youths. An Oasis reunion to entice the olds. Tana French, Matt Haig, and Richard Osman are on the bestseller lists. There was the success of Oppenheimer, which upheld the tradition of giving Oscars to citizens of the Commonwealth. And in the art world, Leonora Carrington’s auction record jumped from $3m to $29m with the sale of Les Distractions de Dagobert, making her the most expensive British-born female visual artist.
Perhaps Britain’s returning the favor for our own tradition of pond-hopping cultural output. A decade has passed since the Booker Prizes opened to American writers, and there were six on this year’s longlist—seven, if we count the New York-born Hisham Matar. Then again, his early novel In the Country of Men was shortlisted before the 2014 rule change. Writers like Matar underline the absurdity of the nativist hand-wringing in the British press. True, the last Booker-winning novel set in England was Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other in 2019. But literature is increasingly transnational. Crowning any new work a State-of-England novel, or the state of any country, embarrasses all concerned. In a year of genocide, conflagration, and displacement, when the West continues to demonize immigrants and ignore refugees, an insistence upon cultural borders is antiquated, if not vaguely revanchist.
This year’s Booker judges deserve kudos for a shortlist that rejects tribalism and troubles accepted ideas of home and homeland. These six novels pop the bubble of collective nostalgia in the service of new accords. The jury is composed of three Brits, one Jamaican, and an American. Ceramicist Edmund de Waal, author of the memoir The Hare with Amber Eyes, serves as chair. Justine Jordan is the long-running fiction editor of The Guardian. Nitin Sawhney is a prolific composer and multi-instrumentalist who has scored film adaptations of Midnight’s Children (Booker winner) and The Namesake (Booker shortlisted). Sara Collins, a former lawyer, wrote the novel The Confessions of Frannie Langton; she’s also a screenwriter and a podcaster. The jury is rounded out by the much-heralded Yiyun Li, whose story collection Wednesday’s Child was a 2024 Pulitzer finalist. Li also judged the inaugural Man Booker International Prize in 2013, which went to Lydia Davis.
The Booker shortlist this year contains two Americans, Percival Everett and Rachel Kushner; Canadian Anne Michaels; Australian Charlotte Wood; Yael van der Wouden, the sole debut and first-ever shortlisted Dutch author; and finally, Brit Samantha Harvey. As the Booker website notes, this is the first time there have been five women on the shortlist. It’s also heartening to see so many veterans, and to imagine readers discovering their backlists.
These six novels share modest page counts and short chapters. The writing is for the most part accessible, the period settings lightly shaded. You won’t find the polyphonic scale of Marlon James, the line-level wit of Shehan Karunatilaka, or even the vivid historical realism of Hilary Mantel.
Which is fine. Half of the shortlist is damned impressive, with innovations in form, commitment to high-wire ideas, and, as ever, rigor and beauty. The other half varies from the hesitant to the overly restless, and in the case of Rachel Kushner, the ideologically muddled.
Rachel Kushner is sometimes compared to Joan Didion, with whom she shares a high-toned Californian sensibility and a preternatural gift for observation in her often globe-spanning political fictions. Plus, she’s cool. Didion had that Corvette Stingray; Kushner, her Kawasaki Ninja.
As befitting someone whose four novels have all been shortlisted for either the Booker or the National Book Award, Kushner’s latest has garnered plenty of attention. Creation Lake is a chimeric novel of ideas, bursting with asides on permaculture and niche seafaring methods. It’s also wildly uneven—alternately rewarding and vexing.
Our heroine, alias Sadie Smith, is an erstwhile American intelligence agent gone private sector. The homophonic wink of her name indicates how seriously Kushner takes the spy genre, whose armature is only intermittently applied. Sadie is more type than character, both mask and void, with a gift for language, a high alcohol tolerance, and an ability to pass among biker gangs and bourgeois creatives’ circles alike. She has no use for disguises or gadgets; her tradecraft consists of honeypots and illegal entrapment. The dark joke is that these are the only skills needed to dupe her pliable (male) marks. Kushner’s spy has much in common with Reno, the artist narrator of The Flamethrowers, whose beauty also grants access to enclaves financed by slumming rich kids—Kushner loves a clique—and whose superlative capabilities, like Reno’s land-speed record, are known only to the reader. (There’s also a bit of Cayce Pollard, the laconic-cool hunter of William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition.)
At the novel’s opening, Sadie has been dispatched by unknown employers to southwest France with instructions to infiltrate the Moulinards, a rural, back-to-the-land commune protesting the creation of local “megabasins.” These artificial lakes threaten to decimate the water table and introduce even more microplastics into the environment. The commune is led by the epigrammatic Pascal Balmy (“Democracy is for predators,” Pascal says when he meets Sadie, over a lunch of cooked duck and salad greens); he may be planning violent direct action against the state.
The book is resolutely unromantic about the communards. Their division of labor is both gendered and atavistic. Instances of rape and pedophilia are minimized or shrugged off. Feral children go unsupervised. To Sadie, this corruption and dysfunction is synecdochic for the country in general. At one point she stops at a mountaintop inn and notices “a pair of women’s Day-Glo-orange underpants snagged in the bushes at eye level”. Such a vivid detail is characteristic of Kushner’s work, as is the trenchant aside that follows a page later, as Sadie imagines the underwear’s owner:
A girl or woman fallen on hard times, not French, and without EU documents, stuck in a rural outpost, picking her way out to the main road in impractical high-heeled shoes of flesh-biting imitation leather, aloe in her purse for rapid-fire hand jobs. She had left her underwear in these woods. Big deal. Her world is full of disposability. The panties hanging on a bush in front of my face are a package of three for five euros at Carrefour. They are like Kleenex. You sweat or leak or bleed into them and then toss them on a bush, or in the trash, or you flush them and clog the plumbing, someone else’s plumbing, ideally.
Sadie, a Berkeley PhD dropout in rhetoric, sees France as one giant non-place, per Baudrillard, and alternately concrete and cornfield, per Ballard. When Kushner is writing in this acerbic mode, there are few better.
Unfortunately, nearly half of Creation Lake focuses on what Kushner is romantic about: the outlandish teachings of the Moulinards’ reclusive guru Bruno Lacombe. Bruno is a wealthy, disillusioned ’68er who retreated from the world decades ago to live underground (literally, in a cave network under his farm), preach “anti-civver” politics, and embrace all things paleo. Sadie has hacked this voluble Kurtz’s email, and she relays to the reader his missives to the commune on the wonders of the neanderthal. Bruno, with the misplaced certainty of someone just doing their own research, believes humanity took a wrong turn at homo sapiens. “Thals” had bigger brains. They dreamt better. And their artistic mark-makings were abstract, not like those slavish, ho-hum figurations in the caves of Lascaux. Sadie’s initial skepticism of Bruno’s ramblings gives way to filial devotion and, by the time we reach the coincidence-rich climax, full conversion. Turns out the professional cipher was the easiest mark of them all.
Bruno, the novel’s underground man, also experiences aural hallucinations he calls “cave frequencies,” which he frames first as metaphor and later as reality. His logic is often shaky if not specious:
Much of life, and what matters to a culture, consists of what a visual artist would deem “fragile materials”: Wood, say, and wax. Feathers, flowers, fish bones. . . . Very little of what comprises culture can be found at a dig site. Stone can be found. And this, Bruno said, is the level of logic we are dealing with: the stones are all that is left, and so let’s call them stone age!
Kushner seems invested in the danger of dilettantes, how they might radicalize when left alone and unchallenged. (Ted Kaczynski’s diary entries, for example, appeared in Kushner’s previous novel.) It’s worth noting we’re not directly given Bruno’s communiques, but Sadie’s summaries of them, and at length. Creation Lake depends upon how seriously one takes this valorization of the paleolithic. Sadie’s on board, but is Kushner? The author’s interviews appear to endorse it, which is disappointing. A reader of le Carré might argue that Sadie is ultimately just another functionary. Her paper-thin cynicism and general emptiness allowed for parasocial capture by an insufferable pamphleteer. Well, it is as you please. This reader could not countenance the sustained, wildly deductive inferences. Not to mention the blind eye cast toward an age when everything was nasty, brutish, and short.
The epilogue relocates Sadie to a setting out of “The White Lotus,” ultimately aligning Bruno’s “tune in, drop out” ethos with a horseshoe politics of libertarian luxury. For Sadie, liberation looks a lot like being white, straight, and rich. How radical.
Critics have called Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional “quiet,” but it’s a quiet I would liken to the cessation of recent noise. The seconds between the fireworks’ finale and the applause. Or a John Cage quiet, which isn’t quiet at all. A muted exteriority allows for Wood’s narrator to internally parse the emergent din of long-buried memory. (Disinterment is also literalized within the plot; more on that to follow.) If this description rings a bell, Wood’s setting will seem happily novel: an isolated abbey in southeastern Australia during the COVID-19 pandemic. The narrator quotes Simone Weil directly: “Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer.”
The novel’s attention to attention alerts our narrator to the distances between the quotidian mind and the larger, capital-S Self, and the distances between ourselves and the sites of our greatest antipathy. These distances are bridged through the narrator’s stubborn, clear-eyed optimism and the capaciousness of Wood’s high moral intelligence. The expansive consciousness of the novel ranges from subjects as varied as climate disaster, sexual assault, deprivation, violence, activism, and, of course, spirituality. Stone Yard Devotional might be the first great COVID novel.
The title derives from its form, which is the diary of a middle-aged woman, recently divorced, whose career revolves around various environmental causes, and who arrives at the abbey through a vague project not unlike an artist residency. (“Nobody will read this but me,” she says, after mentioning a diary kept by a concentration-camp survivor. “Even so, I imagine there are things I’m leaving out.”) The undated entries are anywhere from a paragraph to a few pages in length. Unlike a Catholic devotional, there’s scant scripture or biblical exegesis. She doesn’t even believe in God.
She rooms in spartan chambers and respectfully observes the dozen or so nuns’ daily rituals (not only Vespers and Lauds but more quotidian rituals like communal lunches and lawn care). The sisters tolerate her with minimal decorum. And yet the visit has an immediate effect:
In the church, a great restfulness comes over me. I try to think critically about what’s happening but I’m drenched in a weird tranquility so deep it puts a stop to thought. Is it to do with being almost completely passive, yet still somehow participant? Or perhaps it’s simply owed to being somewhere so quiet; a place entirely dedicated to silence. In the contemporary world, this kind of stillness feels radical. Illicit.
Note the workaday prose. Wood’s narrator notices, just not poetically. The effect is one of earnest and indeterminate questioning, even where the interrogative is absent. More curious than cautious. And the diction sounds like a veteran of the nonprofit space, with its desire for context and precision. One feels the years of grant applications, bureaucracy, and repeated appeals to donors.
The visit has a long-term effect too. We leap forward four years and into the pandemic; our protagonist is now living in the abbey. Her arrangement, approved by the imperious Sister Simone, is unconventional: she hasn’t taken orders nor chosen her saint’s name. For this she receives froideur from the younger residents and ambivalence from older ones, like Sister Bonaventure, who tolerates the narrator’s presence.
The narrator quickly adapts. She farms and gardens. Tries to introduce flavor into their starch-heavy meals. Recognizes the abbey’s affable part-time handyman as an acquaintance from adolescence. While the pandemic is mentioned only glancingly, the rural setting is no idyll. There is an undercurrent of violence: a growing infestation of mice demands increasingly macabre solutions; the narrator obsesses over the gruesome deaths of female saints, detailed in volumes from the abbey’s meager library (which also stocks Thomas Merton and, amusingly, Christopher Hitchens). Her diary detours through moral tests from her childhood —before her parents’ deaths—of a mother’s selflessness and her community’s half-solutions to predatory adults. Wood knows we’re thinking of the church’s own history of scandals. She urges us to consider these and other, possibly hidden corruptions.
The plot, such as it is, concerns the remains of Jennifer Tully, a former sister of the abbey and friend to Sister Bonaventure. Tully had been working in Thailand, helping the local poor and offering protection to victims of abuse, when she disappeared in the late 1990s. Her body has just been discovered on the property of an American priest whose housekeeper received solace from Sister Jenny. The remains, accompanied by a nun named Helen Parry, are to be transported to New South Wales and buried on the local grounds.
Parry holds special import for our narrator. She was a former schoolmate and local pariah, bullied and defiant in equal measure; as a child, the narrator took part in a gang beating against her. As a preteen, Helen was often abandoned by her single mother for weeks at a time. Now she’s a famous, uncompromising activist and general unstoppable object. No one at the abbey welcomes her, and, as the government ties up Sister Jenny’s burial in red tape, they suffer Helen’s ongoing presence with clipped stoicism. Helen also can’t wait to leave, but the pandemic protocols have restricted her travel.
The novel has too much on its mind to linger on the narrator’s guilt with Helen: it’s addressed with speed. A lesser writer would reduce Helen’s character to a cog in the engine of the narrator’s trauma plot. Wood understands that sharpening one’s past isn’t always salutary. It might even abstract the present. Everything has a cost.
The effort required in looking past the abstractions of others and into each individual qua individual is the intense, compassionate work of being human. It’s also a fair definition of the novel. Wood resists easy binaries in pursuit of wondrous ambiguity: the abbey is not only its own world but also the larger one; the narrator is Australian, but her parents are British immigrants who’ve hosted refugees of the Vietnam War; and Christian doctrine sits alongside anecdotes about the Moonies, memories of glossolalic Catholic Charismatic Renewal services, and quotes by Elie Wiesel.
One can read apprenticeship fiction and discern whether the author has suffered a broken heart. In this respect, Wood writes with supreme authority. She knows the value of life, and of that life being extended another day, another week, another month. She also knows how contested “value” might feel to the narrator, with her solitude, and to someone like Helen Parry, with her indefatigable speaking truth to power.
This Devotional admits to no heaven or hell. It ends with an exaltation of the terrestrial, an ironic echo from Ecclesiastes: “All go to one place: all are from the dust, and all return to dust.” Wood, like Kushner, strips the godly from the transcendent. She plumbs the divisions between asceticism and activism, noting when they create a false choice. Kushner opts for a cool distance from her politics, denying us real engagement. For pathos and critique, turn to Stone Yard Devotional.
Like Wood’s abbey, the setting of Yael van der Wouden’s The Safekeep is one of quiet, daily ritual: a domestic space ripe for disruption by the outside world. It’s 1961, and the adult Isabel den Brave lives alone in her childhood home in a city east of Amsterdam. The novel begins with Isabel’s discovery of a mysterious ceramic shard in her vegetable garden, which subtly contests her knowledge of home and unsubtly literalizes the theme of buried history. (Van der Wouden was inspired by her grandparents’ lives and the possible mysteries they held.)
Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, a much-beloved Booker winner and all-around masterpiece.
I can’t chide a novelist for not wholly absorbing their influences, but I do fault them for taking the wrong lessons. The Safekeep is the result of a nascent talent playing it safe.