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.’

In the acknowledgements to Everything Under (Jonathan Cape, £14.99), Daisy Johnson includes Sophocles and Ted Hughes. The rank dark dampness of Hughes’s visceral natural world, and Sophocles’s bloody fated families, certainly haunt here. Johnson rolls out a muddy journey-quest tale, swirling about a young lexicographer and her early life on a battered canal boat, as fantastic as Mark Twain’s lives on the Mississippi are realistic. Her characters struggle to stay afloat in a world of woe. Made-up language and paranoid isolation cannot save them. Everything is under, there is no peace, and things always come up again, bobbing below the water, barely breaking the surface, dangerous as a mine.