Peeled and Portioned: First Leaves
First Leaves
I think we can afford to give debuts a little slack. And so I try to read with good faith and the optimism that the author will see their project through to the end on their own terms, while also letting the reader in. If nothing else, I wanted to be surprised or moved on reading - I’m not interested in sentences for sentences’ sake.
For instance, there was enough in those opening pages of Conversations with Friends - a cold glass against a warm body, a glass icy enough it’s wet to hold, the tension of two people experiencing a sexual tension they shouldn’t - was good enough (hot enough) I had faith in the author’s future abilities. Unlike many of the people I follow online, I have not got early access to the latest Rooney novel so we shall have to wait and see until next week what that’s become in book 3. It has been a long old book campaign though, hasn’t it? The last one I can think of of its kind was Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments, which I’ve not read: its timing felt too much like a tie-in for the tv series than an organically derived sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale.
In the spirit of wanting to go into something fairly, I initially stopped reading Alice Vincent’s debut Rootbound only a few pages in: I honestly had no interest in hearing about someone who in light of the astonishing good fortune to buy a two-bed flat with a boyfriend in London in one’s early/mid-twenties, dropping in that they ‘took on a lodger to help with bills.’ Life’s too short to read in a bad mood, so I gave it a good few months before resuming.
In many ways, I think the story of Vincent’s year and balcony and gardening exploits would’ve been a more interesting read from the perspective of the lodger. As a narrator, Alice takes us through twelve months with the following beats:
Couple splits up, suddenly
Boy and girl alternate use of the bedroom month by month
Girls deals with singledom, kisses someone on the night of a gig
Girl’s love of gardening grows
Girl meets someone new, probably the love of her life
Girl buys a new flat on her own; still loves gardening
The chaos sits with the curious choice to sublet every other month rather than having one of the couple choose to move out completely. That must’ve been a funky dynamic for a third party to be in, and it would’ve made for some juicy pages. Unfortunately, the rest of the plot points have in them enough material for a feature, perhaps an NYT Modern Love or New Yorker piece, but not quite riveting enough for the book-length treatment it receives. In lieu of character growth, there is horticulture, but a memoir really does need character (or else the reeling action scenes in a book like Tara Westover’s Educated) to keep it going. The best bits - devoting time to the ubiquitous purple buddleja bushes that are a familiar fixture beside British railways, or the fact the spread of the Chinese money play across the country was such a folk activity, the botanists at Kew didn’t know about the plant’s existence for decades after it had reached these shores - actually aren’t much to do with being an internship-seeking, instagram-fixated millennial at all. It’s funnier to think about what bad craic these Kew lot weren’t invited to parties (where I got my pilea almost three years ago: still thriving) or bake sales or coffee mornings, than it is to read about generalisations about a particular age cohort in London that would fall apart after asking even just basic questions of the people in any given tube carriage.
I’m not green fingered, whatever that means. All of my childhood and adolescence was spent in rented accommodation so we didn’t have much steer over what went in the garden. Maybe it’s also that I’m stubbornly urban: when my friend returned from grad school abroad this summer she groaned at the mention of land stuff: “I said to someone recently: TRAFFIC JAMS ARE MY SOIL!” But I am curious and I do like hearing about why people like things I don’t yet know or like myself. In an attempt to make the everyday worthy of depicting in literature - you don’t need to try, it just is - Vincent overwrites a little. Some of this is the vernacular of growing: there is something unfairly smug about describing your ‘glut of courgettes’ (and it is always courgettes, isn’t it?) in the same way the comfortably-mortgaged calling wine ‘plonk’ drives me up the wall. The consequence here though, is that gardening feels as fussy and as weirdly precious a past-time as it ever has in my eyes: the generalisations and synonyms (using ‘sororal’ when ‘sisterly’ when talking about your literal sister would suffice) didn’t let me in the way I would have liked.
I compare that to Caleb Azumah Nelson’s debut novel, Open Water. It’s a ‘wan little husk of autofiction’* if ever there was one. Azumah Nelson is a ‘British Ghanian writer and photographer living in South East London’ according to the dust jacket. The man in the novel, the ‘you’ is a British Ghanian writer and photographer living in South East London who got a scholarship to a private school in Dulwich. Like Rootbound, Open Water takes its subject matter - love, growing up, stilted communication in spite of obvious connection - seriously. I respect that as an endeavour; not everything is funny, after all. And the prose is full: on the first page ‘Love made you Black, as in, you were most coloured in her presence. It was not a cause for concern; one must rejoice! You could be yourselves.’
A love story between two young artists, it is noticeable in the fact the pair are both clearly curious about art and culture: listening to music, going to galleries, the theatre, chatting about stuff and helping on friends’ projects. In film and literature, artists are often depicted as geniuses in vacuum. Being inspired and seeking to respond to an ongoing creative and cultural conversation is not the stuff of dramatic tension, but is makes for a far realer depiction of a subset of life for people in this city than relatively surface level truisms about posting to one’s grid. The characters in this novel attend so much stuff because it tells us something about their personalities and motivations; they’re almost uncommonly voracious. Whereas in Rootbound, the assertion is that everyone is interminably online or social media-focused, which doesn’t feel like an earned conclusion. Open Water made me want to feel open to a possibility I had wilfully forgotten about: a world in which you can go to a sweaty, low-ceilinged basement in Dalston or Peckham, meet a friend of a friend, make a connection, and maybe fall in love.
*thanks, Joyce Carol Oates for the critical line of the decade