A choice of first novels | 10 March 2016

At the beginning of this year I underwent a complete literary detox: an absolute, cold-turkey abstention from cutting-edge fiction of every stripe. I subsisted on police procedurals and grown-up Ladybird books, and watched a lot of TV. It was tough, but you’ve got to defrag the old hard drive once in a while. And it was worth it: when this new batch of first novels was helicoptered in, I felt ready to approach the gig in a spirit of optimism and can-do. I’m not even going to rant about the tendency of publishers to overmarket new writers, to box them up, underplay their strangeness and render them safe and familiar.

Love Me Back by Merritt Tierce (Little Brown, £14.99) and Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist by Sunil Yapa (Little, Brown, £12.99) both map acutely observed accounts of subjective emotional experience on to what might once have been called a social realist landscape. In the former, Marie, a waitress, pregnant at 16, juggles shifts, lovers and drug deals in a scarred, exurban landscape that it’s impossible to evoke without resorting to Americanisms — cinderblock, strip malls, parking lots. It’s honest (not least about its subjectivity — there’s an impressionistic, even dreamy quality to some passages), it doesn’t try too hard and it gives you a pretty clear idea of how horrible it must be to work in a restaurant: the expensive ones, where Marie is treated like one of today’s specials by affluent male diners, are often grimmer than the cheap ones, where at least there’s a big-hearted underclass solidarity.

Sunil Yapa’s novel, set during the WTO protests in Seattle in 1999, is organised, with Aristotelian precision, around two opposed viewpoints: that of the chief of police, whom we encounter 20 feet above the crowds in a cherry-picker, fielding commands from the mayor to clear a path through town by any means necessary for the WTO delegates; and that of his dead wife’s son, Victor, sleeping rough after a period bumming round South America, whose initial plan to sell weed to the revellers gives way to a growing involvement with them.