LITERARY FICTION – Jan 09, 2020

YOUR HOUSE WILL PAY

by Steph Cha (Faber £12.99, 320 pp)

In Los Angeles in the early 1990s, racial tensions — already high — were further inflamed when a Korean shopkeeper avoided jail after shooting dead a black schoolgirl she had accused of theft.

Steph Cha changes the details to put the incendiary case at the heart of a smart, sensitive page-turner about how a similar killing haunts the (fictionalised) families involved more than a quarter of a century later.

While Shawn, a removal man, has learned to live with his anger at the death of his sister Ava, old wounds are reopened when Yvonne — the Korean pharmacist who killed her — falls victim to a drive-by shooting.

Shawn instantly attracts suspicion, while Yvonne’s daughter Grace is forced to face up to her mother’s buried past in the 24/7 glare of online media.

A twisty thriller in which drip-fed detail detonates with maximal impact, this terrific novel probes the way politicised rhetoric about race can fail to live up to the messiness of real-life experience.

AMERICA WAS HARD TO FIND

by Kathleen Alcott (W&N £8.99, 432 pp)

This fitfully absorbing saga of mid-20th-century America essentially offers three novels for the price of one, but whether that’s quite the bargain it sounds, I don’t know.

It opens in the Mojave Desert, where Fay, a young waitress, gets into bed with a married astronaut, Vincent, who is in training for the Apollo 11 mission.

After he gets her pregnant, Vincent — a future all-American hero — has nothing to do with the child, who is raised among a cell of militant radicals protesting against the Vietnam War.

Later we see Fay’s son amid the Aids crisis in San Francisco, where his psychic turmoil only deepens when he is repeatedly told he looks like the first man on the moon.

While there are moments of searing scene-making on display here, Alcott’s characters can’t sustain her epic sweep in its drearier longueurs. And call me unimaginative, but I never quite felt she reached the level of escape velocity that would have let me pretend Neil Armstrong never existed…

A GOOD MAN

by Ani Katz (Heinemann £12.99, 224 pp)

In the year 2020 it all but goes without saying that any novel titled A Good Man will in fact be about a manipulative creep who is exhibit A for the much-discussed notion of toxic masculinity.

So it proves in this riveting but thoroughly ugly debut — an American Psycho for the 21st century.

When Thomas, an opera-loving advertising executive and married father, spends the first page ominously describing the truncheon he bought on eBay, we know it won’t end well.

And when his big-bucks pitch to a smartphone firm lands belly-up, it’s a sign we need to read between the lines of his unreliable testimony, in which accounts of nobly fending off a drunken female junior isn’t the only tall tale.

In the end, though, the real question left hanging in this superior psychological noir is how far it really has anything new to say about the horrifying mentality it so coolly describes.