Every first novelist with even quasi-autobiographical leanings is obliged to confront a version of the same challenge: how do you reconcile an emphasis on private and often limited experience with openness to the world at large? One solution is to ignore all that other stuff, and concentrate on a single character, or pair, or small group, falling in love, learning a lesson, clearing a succession of hurdles. But at a time when the news cannot be dismissed as noise, in the aftermath of the financial crisis, Brexit and Trump, Black Lives Matter (BLM) and #MeToo, that’s not a common or particularly feasible route. It isn’t just that you invite the charge of solipsism or quietism, complacency or irrelevance. What used to be “context”, the admirable second layer, is now impossible to avoid.
Jo Hamya, in the crisp and resonant Three Rooms, and Amber Medland, in her enveloping comedy of millennial manners Wild Pets, exhibit a hyper-receptivity to present travails and their effect on the burgeoning-adult sensibility. Both books start with a strikingly beady, academically accomplished ethnic-minority English woman embarking on a postgraduate degree. Both take place in the recent past – both, in fact, come to an end in late October 2019. And both derive their titles from a modernist writer in essayist mode: Virginia Woolf describing the “room of one’s own” needed by the female writer, TS Eliot invoking the cliché of Blake as “a wild pet for the supercultivated”.
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