The Baby
Marie Darrieussecq (trans Penny Hueston)
Text, £12.99, pp208
“Women intending to write literature, to really write, keep at a prudent distance from the theme of babies,” notes French novelist Marie Darrieussecq in this book of vignettes plucked from notes made while her son was a nursling. It’s worth noting that The Baby first appeared in French in 2002, predating the recent spate of highbrow mummy memoirs out to reclaim motherhood, but it’s nonetheless a rich, if sometimes eyebrow-raising, addition. “My maternal love is first and foremost paedophile,” she declares. Less provocatively – or indeed pompously – she gloriously captures those becalmed early days of motherhood in all their dazed, delighted disbelief. The question that nags her throughout is whether it’s possible to be a good mother while maintaining an independent life of the mind. Yes, is her joyous answer, though that’s not to say there aren’t missteps along the way.
Looker
Laura Sims
Headline, £8.99, pp192
The unnamed narrator of this slender, noir-ish novel is a voyeur who’s also intensely aware – in the way that few women escape – of the way that she herself appears. She even believes she could be mistaken for her quarry: the actress who lives across the way. In reality, a similar shade of lipstick is all that unites them. While the movie star lives with her family in an immaculately renovated brownstone, our narrator, an untenured literature professor teaching night classes, lives in a bare apartment. To complete the cliche, failed attempts to get pregnant have wrecked her marriage, so she now shares it with her soon-to-be-ex’s cat. There’s a knowingness to the narrative that seems on occasion to be satirising its own sorry protagonist – especially in a scene towards the end that should probably carry trigger warnings for ailurophiles – and this is how it’s best enjoyed, even as it reels tipsily towards thriller territory.
The Messenger
Shiv Malik
Guardian Faber, £12.99, pp336 (paperback)
When journalist Shiv Malik first spoke with erstwhile Islamist Hassan Butt in the wake of London’s 7/7 bombings, he felt sure that he was dealing with a highly knowledgeable, rational individual. He was, he now writes, “completely and devastatingly wrong”. His account of how he, and others besides, were taken in by Butt is as gripping as any spy novel, and altogether more unnerving. Though the pair had much in common, from age and ethnicity to dads who’d served jailtime, it was to Malik’s idealism that Butt, a Monopoly-playing Mancunian whose pet phrase is “Okey-dokey”, really appealed. It’s only as they’re trying to sell a jointly written book that Malik is faced with the sickening realisation that he’s been conned. But is his source a fanatic or a fantasist? Malik’s frankness is compelling, and he draws perceptive conclusions about the ways in which plausibility and credulity both can become culpability.
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