No end in sight | 20 September 2018

Novels today do not want to be done. Thank Anthony Burgess and John Fowles for this, most immediately, but alternate endings, or the purposeful failure to finish, run long and deep in fiction in English, all the way back to Laurence Sterne and ‘I caught hold of the fille de chambre’s —.’ Modern novels shear off into bleakness or point to awful repeating cycles; Victorian ones twist that prettily tied bow of a marriage plot into question and challenge (none more so than Henry Esmond).

Be glad of an autumn of fine first novels that downright relish resisting closure. Pretend I’m Dead by Jen Beagin (Oneworld Publications, £12.99), about a young housekeeper named Mona, who finds intimacy in picking up after careless people instead of reflecting on her own broken past, is a bright, brittle achievement. Beagin once cleaned houses and photographed herself on the job. Her details are visual, sharp and often hurting: Mona dusts the ‘shrine’ of photographs of Zoe, the child of divorced parents, noting, as she finishes: ‘Zoe was alone in every photograph.