Worlds within worlds

The Heavens is Sandra Newman’s eighth book. It follows novels featuring, variously, sex addiction, Buddhism and a post-apocalyptic teen dystopia; a memoir; a handbook on how not to write a novel; and two irreverently erudite guides to the canon. The variety of these accomplishments indicates Newman’s roving and playful intelligence, together with a kind of wilful unpredictability and a deep engagement with literary forms and traditions. These qualities have attained a sublime height in The Heavens, a work of remarkable skill and invention, linguistic brio and righteous political intent, and one which gleefully defies categorisation.

‘Ben met Kate at a rich girl’s party,’ the novel begins. New York: August, the year 2000, solar-powered tea-lights on the terrace. Ben and Kate fall — sweetly, convincingly — in love. They discuss politics. Kate is an artist; Ben is ashamed of his energy-industry job. They are anxious about the world’s environmental distress; they have sex in loft apartments; they fight about their parents. Such familiar territory is swiftly undermined — this is not the year 2000 the reader will recall. President Chen is in power; she is a woman; there is talk of a Universal Basic Income. It is ‘the first year with no war at all, when you opened up the newspaper like opening a gift’.

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Kate’s New York life is interrupted by dreams in which she is not Kate but Emilia, who lives in Longditch, London in 1593 — a plague year, with Elizabeth I in her fourth decade on the throne. In these passages, Newman elegantly and decisively changes register. ‘Prithee, come and light the fire, child,’ says Emilia. This cod-Shakespearean lexis would ordinarily cause me to hurl a book at the wall, but here it brings a surreal and fevered quality to Emilia’s sections of the novel, against which modern New York begins to seem not more ordinary but more strange.