This is Lana Citron's first novel and it is nothing if not ambitious. A very 1990s tale of young people in London, Sucker manages to be a book about more than just youth, or rather "yoof", a feat many before her have attempted and failed to carry off.
Nonny is the central character, a Trinity College graduate (like Citron herself) who has moved to London with her good friend, Bea. There the similarity between the two ends. Bea is a not particularly likeable but nonetheless enjoyable twentysomething, determined to get a ring on her finger before the big Three-Oh and much given to making lists about the relative merits of boyfriends, past and present.
Nonny is an altogether more shadowy figure, kept in luxury by the smooth, linen-suited Marcus, addicted to one-night stands with people she identifies only as Yobman or Headcase, and yearning, despite herself, for something more out of life. There is also Ruth the flatmate, a herbal tea addict who gets her kicks from sexlines; Brian, who is passionate about picking his nose and sometimes about Bea; and Adam, who is divorced, a solicitor, and offers a hint of a better life for Nonny. While Bea starts moving along the fast track to her Nirvana - respectability and a man, in that order - Nonny is doing her best to avoid a "rising tide of feelings" and carry on living irresponsibly. Woven through their everyday squalls and adventures in nightclub land is the imminent court case of C.C. Arles, actor, possible rapist and the extra who eventually ties up the whole plot.
Citron has assembled a marvellous cast of players and when she lets them speak with their own voices the result is splendid. The foibles of her unlikeable characters are quite brilliant - who hasn't met an odious Ian who responds to Nonny's refusal for a date with "And a ticket to see the English National Opera followed by a meal at the best restaurant in this goddamn city isn't tempting?" The London portrayed in Sucker, a city where temping is the norm, clubs are loud and full of possibilities and social rules are made to be broken, is all refreshingly realistic.
Where Sucker falls down is in the almost overriding trickiness of the narrative voice. Each sentence has been tweaked and loaded with wordplays and complicated, extended descriptions - "Each of us trailing our dog dirt behind us, our careful agendas held in surgical hands, pooper-scoopered, scuppered." Although the narrative rarely shifts out of this almost obsessively obscure stream of consciousness, it sometimes swerves into poems, screenplay-like schedules and fables that are just a little too self-conscious. When it works, Citron's style has a brilliant freshness and a clever density, but all too often it annoys more than it illuminates.
The most detrimental effect of the dense, pun-laden language is that it almost fatally obscures both the plot line and the foundations on which the characters are built. Although Citron appears to want the reader to understand from where Nonny's dysfunctions stem, she fails to elaborate, apart from the suggestion of one incident of child abuse, which seems to be obligatory in first novels recently. When the rather well-worked-out story turns like a Ferris wheel towards completion, there is a real danger that the reader will neither care nor fully understand.
In Sucker, Lana Citron is exploring a lexicon and an idiom for the twentysomething - a task that is often attempted and rarely done well. While at times she appears to get distracted by the many facets of language and her own wordy ingenuity, she has gone a lot further than most and is definitely an author to watch in the future.
Louise East is an Irish Times columnist
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