This month’s best paperbacks: Percival Everett, Judith Butler and more

Caledonian Road is an addictively enjoyable yarn; a state-of-the-nation social novel with the swagger and bling of an airport bestseller and an insider’s grasp on the nuances of high culture. But this bustling, boisterous burlesque has the sour undertow of despair. The London that emerges from its 600-odd pages resembles a vast, rotting carcass picked over by carrion. The people live off it, not in it, and seem to be intent on stripping the place to the bone.

Our tour guide of sorts is 52-year-old Campbell Flynn, a celebrity writer and academic who owns a house in Islington’s Thornhill Square, maintains a second home out in Suffolk and recently completed a money-spinning self-help book called Why Men Weep in Their Cars. Life is good, he’s living the dream, which is another way of saying that he’s careering towards disaster, folded in with an ensemble cast of aristocrats and human traffickers, screen actors and newspaper columnists.

Bounding from the penthouse to the pavements, administering to a sprawling cast of characters, Caledonian Road nods most obviously to Dickens, although it also stirs memories of Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities and Paolo Sorrentino’s film The Great Beauty. It’s a bold, bullish tale of hubris and corruption, a book simultaneously dazzled and disgusted by the city it depicts.

James is the Booker prize-shortlisted retelling of Mark Twain’s 1884 classic, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, from the point of view of Jim, the runaway slave who joins Huck on his journey down the Mississippi river.

While it would be possible to enjoy James without knowing the original, its power derives from its engagement with Twain’s book. The most vexed aspect of Huckleberry Finn is the portrayal of Jim, for decades the most prominent black character in the American literary canon. While 14-year-old Huck memorably struggles to reconcile his learned prejudice with his growing love for his enslaved companion, Jim – an adult with a wife and children – has no such arc. Jim in fact becomes progressively more one-dimensional as the book flops towards its clumsy denouement. Loyal, superstitious, childishly simple, Jim’s main purpose in the novel is to give Huck an opportunity to exhibit his moral growth.

Enter Percival Everett, no stranger to debates about the representation of race. His 2001 novel, Erasure, adapted for the screen as the Oscar-winning American Fiction, told the story of a highbrow African American novelist despairing at the reception of his work and winning unexpected acclaim with a bogus account of black urban despair. With James, Everett goes back to Twain’s novel on a rescue mission to restore Jim’s humanity. He reconceives the novel and its world, trying to reconcile the characters and the plot with what now seems obvious to us about the institution of slavery. The result is funny, entertaining and deeply thought-provoking – part critique and part celebration of the original.

Atkinson’s private investigator Jackson Brodie is back, having “climbed to the wrong side of 60”, and it is a real joy to see him again. Death at the Sign of the Rook throws Brodie into the middle of an Agatha Christie-esque mystery when he is hired by elderly siblings to find a painting that has gone missing from their late mother’s wall. Brodie discovers parallels with the theft of a Turner painting from a nearby stately home. As he is wont to say, “a coincidence is just an explanation waiting to happen”, and he’s delighted to discover that old friend Reggie Chase, the orphan who saved his life back in When Will There Be Good News?, was in charge of that investigation. Reggie is less pleased – “we’re not a partnership, we’re not ‘Brodie and Chase, Detectives’,” she tells him – but they are soon back in harness when a handy snowstorm means they’re trapped in the stately home, along with a cast of vicars, butlers, majors, aged dowagers, etc, of whom Christie would be proud. An axe murderer stalks the moors, there’s a body in the pantry and a cast of actors on the loose.

This stands alone as a crime novel, but it is better enjoyed having read the previous books in the Brodie series. And why wouldn’t you, anyway – they are all a delight. I defy you not to snort with laughter as the novel progresses to its farcical denouement. Atkinson is just brilliant.

It’s not quite a joke to say the US philosopher’s latest book could have been called Who’s Afraid of Judith Butler, because many people are; all the fears and fantasies poured into the idea of “gender”, which this new work explores, are also poured into its author. Butler’s work has been defined as diabolical, and the professor as some sort of she-devil – or rather they-devil – a convenient vessel for current anxieties about the stability of sex.

More than 30 years after their best-known book Gender Trouble was published, Butler is still having to explain that they never said sex doesn’t matter. I can tell they are frustrated and angry, because this is the most accessible of their books so far, an intervention meant for a wide audience.

Butler explains that “gender” has become a phantasm, representing multiple human fears and anxieties about sexuality, bodily attributes, sex and relationships. These anxieties have been stoked and manipulated by rightwingers in positions of religious and secular power to more effectively project the harms they are complicit in on to women and minorities.

The only answer, Butler says, is to form an axis of resistance; to “gather the targeted movements more effectively than we are targeted”. People who may not be friends, who disagree, need to work together, because they’re all in line for the same persecution, sooner or later – all women, all minorities, all those minoritised. Solidarity is not home, Butler reminds us, using a well-known phrase coined by feminist Bernice Johnson Reagon. It doesn’t have to be cosy.

Because Butler is a human rights activist, as well as a theorist, the urgent point conveyed by this book is the same as it is in all their work: why are so many people seemingly happy to give away their power to increasingly authoritarian forces? And why are they so confident that this power will never be used against them?

On leaving Westminster politics, Britain’s first Green MP Caroline Lucas, left us with a parting shot: a book that sketches out an alternative vision of England to the jingoistic and aggressive one conjured up by culture war squabbles.

Though the idea that there are other ways to be English than getting misty-eyed about the white cliffs of Dover or nostalgic for the days of empire is obviously not a new one, in the current climate of increasingly belligerent nationalism it certainly bears repeating. What marks out Lucas’s contribution to what is fast becoming a whole new genre of books is that it’s not really a history or piece of contemporary reportage. Instead, it’s more of an armchair journey through England’s literary canon, from Chaucer to Shakespeare, the Romantic poets and Jane Austen. The lesson she takes from this diverse literary heritage is that “we do not need a single national story” but a whole range of them; and that for every nation-building myth co-opted by the conservative right, there are equally deep-rooted and authentic traditions the left could draw on to talk about what Englishness means to them.

The most compelling parts of the book deal with the relationship between Englishness, nature and the land. Lucas astutely points out that visions conjured up by prime ministers from Stanley Baldwin to John Major tend to be weirdly divorced from how most people actually live, evoking idyllic rural landscapes full of birdsong and blacksmiths toiling at their anvils, rather than the four-fifths of the population who actually live in cities and towns. Yet the reality under successive governments, she says, has been the widespread despoiling of the countryside politicians claim to revere. Why shouldn’t Englishness mean protecting the places that supposedly make us who we are?

And there are much-needed crumbs of hope for the future in the chapter covering the politics of immigration, where Lucas argues that younger generations “just do not see a multi-ethnic, multicultural society as something to fear” and may in time shift public debate accordingly. Another England is possible? Well, let’s hope she’s right.

My Heavenly Favourite, the second novel from acclaimed Dutch author Lucas Rijneveld, belongs to a tiny, controversial subgenre: novels about child sex abuse rendered in exquisite prose. It is all the more transgressive in that it’s narrated by the abuser, who addresses his victim in an incantatory, unflinchingly graphic second-person rant about his eternal love. Such a book has to clear a very high bar not to seem like a cynical exercise. Rijneveld’s novel leaps effortlessly over, with room to spare.

The narrator is a 49-year-old vet serving a small farming community in the Netherlands, and his “heavenly favourite” is the troubled 14-year-old daughter of a dairy farmer. Neither is given a name: he calls her “Little Bird” or “Putto”; she calls him “Kurt” for Kurt Cobain. Little Bird is an outsider for her intellectual precocity, for what may be a budding psychosis, and for her secret, obsessive desire to have a penis. She is also sexually naive for her age, having been raised in a strict religious family, in which communication was short-circuited by the tragic death of her older sibling and the desertion of her mother. This echoes Rijneveld’s first novel, the International Booker-winning The Discomfort of Evening; both books draw on the author’s background.

My Heavenly Favourite squares up deliberately to Lolita, citing it throughout, and Rijneveld compares well with Nabokov in the richness of his invention and the delicacy of his prose, while taking a much more serious approach to their shared subject. Indeed, Rijneveld conveys the squalor and despair of sexual violence with more fidelity than any other author I have read. But this novel is not only a surprisingly successful treatment of a difficult subject. It’s a unique creation and a tour de force of transgressive imagination – a dazzling addition to the oeuvre of an author of prodigious gifts.

As proposed national rallying cries go, perhaps this one lacks swagger. But its modesty is deliberate, as the economist and Observer columnist Torsten Bell’s surprisingly hopeful new guide to halting this country’s crumbling decline explains. Chest-beating political promises to put the Great back into Great Britain are, he writes, really just distracting from the real issue, which is that the British are exceptional all right – only not in a good way. We stand out from our pack of medium-sized, richer-than-average countries for our low productivity, chronic wage stagnation and American-style high inequality (but sadly without the higher growth of the US).

We have truly world-beating housing costs, higher than any other Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) country but Finland, but magically still deliver less living space per capita in return than famously cramped New York; we boast, if that’s the word, fewer hospital beds than all bar one other OECD nation.

Yet while Brits have somehow been conditioned over the past 14 years to accept creeping impoverishment as some kind of gloomily inevitable new norm, our neighbours show it needn’t be. A middle-income German household is now a startling 20% richer than their British counterpart and the equivalent French household 9% ahead. “Talk of being ‘world beating’ is a distraction from what we really need to be: more normal,” concludes Bell. Helpfully, the latter is actually within our grasp.

Overall this is an incisive, upbeat vision of how a Labour government could turn things around even in difficult times. The one good thing about Britain digging itself into a hole, Bell notes, is that we could deliver a surprising amount of growth just by catching up to where we should be. Or in other words, the advantage of doing this badly is that things can – to misquote D:Ream – surprisingly swiftly get better.

Lauren Oyler, an American literary critic who writes for Harper’s Magazine and the New Yorker, believes her metier is under threat. “I am a professional, and I am in danger,” she declares in My Perfect Opinions, one of eight previously unpublished essays gathered in her first nonfiction book. She wonders if popular digital platforms such as Goodreads, where users can upload book reviews with minimal editorial filtering, will have long-term ramifications for the more considered, rigorous literary criticism that she gets paid to write. What these online communities lack in intellectual acumen, they make up for in sheer weight of numbers. Are they reshaping literary culture in their own image?

The answer seems to be yes. Oyler believes a facile populism has crept into arts and culture commentary in recent years, premised on the notion that, since all taste is ultimately subjective, anything can be as good as anything else – evidenced, for example, in some critics’ insistence that Marvel comics deserve to be treated as serious art. “To reduce appeal to a matter of taste and temperament is the most boring way to be irrefutably correct,” Oyler notes. This tendency, a kind of philistinism dressed up as anti-elitism, lies at the heart of what she calls “today’s crisis in culture criticism”.

The essays in No Judgement demonstrate an agile and discerning mind. Oyler’s intellectual earnestness is offset by a disarmingly chatty prose style – her voice is by turns anecdotal, playful, ironically self-deprecating. She is stimulating company on the page, and rarely dull. However, one or two of the talking points here feel ever so slightly old hat: a widely shared 2010 Ted Talk on the importance of vulnerability; the demise of the gossip website Gawker, following a 2013 lawsuit; the online media landscape around 2016; Berlin being a thing.

A quibble, perhaps, but cultural discourse moves frighteningly fast these days. In stark contrast, the pace of book publishing is notoriously glacial. This presents something of a challenge for literary agents and editors, who have to try to bottle the good stuff before the fizz goes out. What’s taking them so long?

Andrew McMillan’s debut poetry collection physical, an explicit yet tender study of masculinity in the post-industrial north of England, was a thrilling paean to young queer male experience in the noughties. In 2015 it became the first poetry collection to win the Guardian first book award; its successor, playtime, took the inaugural Polari prize for LGBTQ+ literature and was followed in 2021 by pandemonium.

McMillan has now harnessed his considerable talent to writing a novel. Pity, appearing 40 years after the 1984-85 miners’ strike, which convulsed parts of the UK and divided working-class communities, draws on three generations of men from the same family whose lives have been dominated by the local pit – closed since the end of the strike – near Barnsley in South Yorkshire, McMillan’s home town.

This is not a novel specifically about the strike and its outcome, although its embittered legacy is skilfully threaded through its pages. Pity is a book about male identity and sexuality – whether anxiously concealed or proudly open – and about the ravages of history and politics, most significantly on the working-class towns and cities of South Yorkshire such as Barnsley and Sheffield. Comprising multiple viewpoints, the narrative is impressively ambitious for a book of fewer than 200 pages.

Pity is a novel of huge compassion, especially for its older characters, former pit workers Alex and Brian, persistently trapped underground in spirit, if not in actuality. “Pits close: we still sink into them,” Brian writes, but the words themselves are a form of release. And underneath it all is history, viscous and tarry, its forces ticking away like a timebomb.

Why do smart women expect their lovers to leave their wives, despite overwhelming evidence that the contrary is more likely? Australian critic Madeleine Gray is the latest writer to explore this question, in an acutely witty debut that charts, in painful detail, the inexorable arc of an affair between a disaffected millennial and her older, married boss.

The story is not original. That’s the point. Yet Green Dot’s potency lies in its narrator’s distinctive voice, ruthless self-scrutiny and droll observations on the absurdities of young adult life. That narrator is Hera: 24, world-weary, hyperaware of every cliche attached to her situation, and its likely outcome. But when you really want someone, you go for it, she tells us, consequences be damned.

We follow Hera from instant-messenger flirtation to after-work drinks, from the untimely discovery that fortysomething Arthur is married to the decision to continue nonetheless. No one is more surprised by the force of her feelings than Hera, who identified as a lesbian before meeting Arthur and derives an illicit thrill from playing the role of a heterosexual girlfriend. Her vision tunnels until she can see only him – or the green dot that shows he’s online. It becomes increasingly uncomfortable to read about the sacrifices she makes for crumbs of his time and affection, as she clutches at the mirage of stability he represents.

The book is peppered with pop cultural allusions, from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Black Books and Hera Lindsay Bird. This is literature of the digital era, honed on Twitter. Some sentences, freighted with subordinate clauses, feel effortful, but Gray has a parodist’s ear for the cadences, platitudes and jargon of modern speech, and a gift for bathos: “We have a job to do, after all, which is to colour-code profiles on a screen until we die.”

Although ironic and flippant, Green Dot avoids nihilism, and is ultimately about the search for meaning through love. It vividly illustrates how someone can lose their perspective, principles and dignity in its name, ignoring overwhelming evidence of the probable conclusion. “I understand why people blow up their lives,” declares Hera. “If the choice is this or not this, I will destroy everything else every time.”

For much of the 1980s and 90s, every corner of Brixton seemed to be a visible site of resistance and radicalism – from the disturbances of April 1981 to the emergence of the Voice newspaper, the Brixton Black Women’s Group and the Race Today collective. At the same time, though, the south London neighbourhood was home to another mostly hidden struggle for recognition, fought by the first generation of out Black gay men.

Writer and Guardian assistant newsletter editor Jason Okundaye’s groundbreaking debut focuses on those pioneers, using six mini-biographies to craft a lucid account of a story that’s long been obscured.

At its best, Okundaye’s research and interviews completely recast key moments in Black British history. The book can become too intricate at times, though: details that would have worked as footnotes flood certain sections, dulling the sharpness of the accounts. But when the stories are given room to breathe it’s as though a new layer of Black history is being revealed. Some of the men, such as Alex Owolade – a relentless, divisive Trotskyite activist – feel familiar. Others, such as Ajamu X – the artist and host of fetish parties from Huddersfield – represent a complete departure from stereotypes of Black Britishness.

Revolutionary Acts offers beautiful rendered storytelling that never veers into sentimentality. At the beginning of the book, Okundaye tells us that recording Black British history can often feel like “a rescue effort, a race against time” as subjects die, taking with them their stories and insights into under-researched episodes. We should be grateful that he has managed to capture a vital moment that – at so many points – could have been lost for ever.

Leafy suburbs and garden cities emerged at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, the result of fears that the frenetic environment of overcrowded cities induced “nervous feebleness” in people and could actually make them ill. According to Des Fitzgerald, “this idea has never fully gone away” and indeed has re-emerged in the age of climate change, with many urban planners seeing trees, parks and biomimetic architecture as solutions to the city’s problems. But Fitzgerald is sceptical about such fashionable ideas, suspecting that all they do is inflate house prices and subvert what he regards as the unique dynamism of urban life – the “lively, messy, unpredictable city”.

Fitzgerald’s book explores the relationship between architecture, cities and nature, and argues that “the science and politics of green urbanism is a great deal more complex than we want to admit”. He takes us back to the leafy origins of the garden city movement, visiting Welwyn Garden City for the hundredth anniversary of its founding in 1920, talking to architects such as George Saumarez Smith, who helped design King Charles’ traditionalist new town of Poundbury in Dorset (“an undeniably weird place”), and explaining how Melbourne set up a “digital urban forest” to help its inhabitants understand the plight of the city’s rich heritage of trees, and which allowed them to send messages to individual street trees. Some were apparently so poignant they made the person who came up with the idea cry.

Faced with such touching testimony, Fitzgerald does grudgingly acknowledge that “trees really do something for people in cities”. But he insists that the issue is much more complicated than it seems, and he distrusts the recent rash of reports about the “supposedly calming effect of nature” on urbanites. Instead, he argues that we are culturally primed to view cities as stressful environments and that this is the real problem we need to address: “perhaps, instead of trying to fix the city, we could try to fix ourselves…and the anti-urban public culture that we’ve allowed to flourish”.

This is a provocative and entertaining guide to the history of attempts to green the city, one that raises many important issues that, as the world becomes increasingly urban, deserve to be discussed. But at the heart of his book is a passionate plea for a return to the progressive idealism of modernist architects and planners, people who genuinely believed in “the city as a city”, and not as a park or a forest.

Nicholas Dames admits to being “a bookish type”. A professor of humanities at Columbia University, his study of the history of the chapter begins with one of the earliest extant examples of a chaptered text: the tabula Bembina. A bronze tablet that was originally more than two metres wide, this was made for a forum in the region of Urbino, Italy, in the late second century BCE. On it were inscribed legal statutes dating to the Gracchan land reforms of 133-121 BCE.

What is unique about it is the way in which the statutes were presented: each section is prefaced by headings followed by a space. Though not yet numbered, the headings took the form of a brief Latin summary – a noun phrase introduced by the ablative “de”, meaning “concerning” or “in which”. This would later become the default form for signalling the start of a chapter.

Surprisingly then, chaptering did not begin in a book, but in a legal inscription. Indeed, as Dames shows, the adoption of the chapter by prose fiction was “slow and partial”. Though it remained optional well into the eighteenth century, Henry Fielding’s novel Joseph Andrews (1742) delightfully compares a chapter break to “an inn or resting-place, where he [the reader] may stop and take a glass, or any other refreshment, as it pleases him”.

According to Dames, the history of the chapter is both deep and long, but “the novel is where the creative potential of that history culminates”. Its role became that of “segmenting time” and this sat uneasily with the aims of some novelists, for it “breaks up what should be continuous, interrupts what should be immersive”. John Berger highlighted the limitations of chaptering in G. (1972): “The relations which I perceive between things…tend to form in my mind a complex synchronic pattern. I see fields where others see chapters.”

However, by segmenting time, the chapter has gained a metaphorical power that is quite unique: we commonly speak of starting a new chapter in our life, but no one refers to the “paragraphs of my life”. This “innocuous, ubiquitous device” which dates back some two millennia has, argues Dames, “a purchase on one of the grander claims of written narrative: to be capable of representing, and even structuring, what it feels like to have an experience in time”.

Dames is a wonderfully attentive reader of literature, who is alive to every subtlety and nuance of his subject. His study is a superb example of scholarly writing that is thoughtful, erudite and filled with memorable insights.