To Save and to Destroy: On Writing as an Other by Viet Thanh Nguyen (Harvard University Press, £22.95)
Nguyen’s To Save and to Destroy is a heartfelt work of scholarship that tries to untangle some of the complexities of otherness. Expanding on his Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, Nguyen interrogates the outsider’s place through the lens of the literature that forged him as a writer, from Herman Melville to Percival Everett.
His prose is lucid, intellectually rigorous and emotionally intimate, balancing literary critique with elements of autobiography. Though many of the memories he studies are of violence and generational trauma, Nguyen’s worldview is characterised by hope. The slim volume works towards a soaring conclusion, On the Joy of Otherness, in which he dismantles reductive narratives of inclusion to uncover the radical, often joyful, potential of being an outsider. Ruby Eastwood
Shock Induction by Chuck Palahniuk (Simon & Schuster, £15.99)
The Amergin Step: An Exploration in the Imagination of Iveragh by Paddy Bushe
Reviews in brief: How the ‘other’ lives and writes, high-school satire and self-destructive undergrads
Silent Catastrophes by WG Sebald review: Hope may be the thing just seems miserable
The Book of George by Kate Greathead: The arrested development and identity crisis of a modern man
Palahniuk’s writing has always had a sadistic streak, but now it’s turned on the reader. ‘Are you feeling sleepy yet? Can you feel your eyes closing?’ he writes after a particularly tedious passage. There are digressions into Aristotle, Friedrich Nietzsche and the art of storytelling. There are occasional flashes of the old brilliance, without the urgency.
Palahniuk’s latest novel is depressing in exactly the same way that Eminem’s last album was, and for similar reasons. Both artists came up in the late 1990s with a razor-sharp and irresponsibly funny vision of the sickness at the heart of the United States. Now that the motivating force of their rage has been dulled by critical and commercial validation, their attempts to remain radical only come off as developmentally arrested. Ruby Eastwood
These Violent Delights by Micah Nemerever (Magpie, £9.99)
If love is the pursuit of wholeness, then These Violent Delights is not a love story, though it’s often billed as one. Nemerever’s debut novel traces the pernicious relationship between two egotistic undergraduates in 1970s Pittsburgh – the aggrieved Paul and the aristocratic Julian – as they try to intrigue, undermine, and, occasionally, understand each other. During a summer apart, they nurture a murderous obsession from concept to (pun intended) execution.
Drawing from his art history background, Nemerever crafts visually rich prose focused on the body; this story is full of black bruises, wind-bitten faces and milk-white scars. Though the characters name-drop the likes of Plato, their strongest desires are neither intellectual nor romantic but self-destructive, draining the novel of tragic potential and leaving only tedium behind. Kristen Malone Poli
