Keith Miller

Dangerous living

Tom Lee, Matthew Weiner and Jeremy Tiang, already known as writers in other genres, make their welcome debuts as novelists

Here come three novels marketed as debuts but written by authors with some sort of previous, be it in short stories, journalism, theatre, television or a combination of the above.

The Alarming Palsy of James Orr by Tom Lee (Granta, £12.99) takes a fable and transplants it into real life — in this case bourgeois southern British suburban life — where the neat conclusions we might draw from it if we encountered it in a more distilled form are muffled and made strange. The exemplar of Kafka is obvious (both Metamorphosis and The Trial); but I found myself thinking also of John Cheever, Richard Yates and other American writers who needle away at the pain and self-delusion behind the sleek lives of the executive class.

James Orr isn’t much of an unreliable narrator, just an ordinary, appalling white-collar mook, who has found himself in what would, in other hands, have been a classic horror-story location: New Glades, a 1960s development, ‘built on ancient woodland owned by a monstrously wealthy private trust’. He is the sort of homme moyen sensuel who is given rather more sympathetic life in Jon Canter’s much underrated Worth.

Suddenly and inexplicably deformed by disease, James is treated badly by all except his children. In due course, after a period of anomie and uprootedness, he finds himself acting badly in return to everyone he meets, including his children — though rather less badly than many would in his shoes.

Heather, The Totality by Matthew Weiner (Canongate, £14.99) is a lean, sharp meta-thriller. The writing is laconic and assured, though Weiner can be cloth-eared at times, using the same preposition slightly differently twice in a sentence, and so on. But as storytelling goes — or, given Weiner’s celebrated work on Mad Men, storyboarding — it is superb.

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