In many ways, the novel shares a spirit with AM Homes’s This Book Will Save Your Life, though the differences are key. Homes’s protagonist Richard Novak is an affluent business man at the nadir of a conscious retreat from society, living an anaesthetised, hermetically-sealed existence within his luxury LA apartment. After what was either a brush with death or severe panic attack, Novak gradually re-emerges from his solitude, engaging in a series of bizarre and often New Age lifestyle choices as he integrates into a hyperreal Californian society. While Homes is witty and hilarious when commenting on all of this, it is conspicuous just how happy and fulfilled Novak becomes, as though for all of our ironic sniggering he is healed by the so-called banalities of self-help strategies.

Which brings us to Beagin’s protagonist, Mona. A house cleaner, Mona is at the other end of the social spectrum to Novak, though actively resists attempts and suggestions that she try to climb the ladder toward something more respectable. Which isn’t to say her sense of self-worth is robust. The beginning of the novel finds her volunteering at a needle exchange, where she soon meets an addict she knows only as Mr Disgusting and falls for him hard. “For the first time in years,” Beagin writes, “she felt beautiful, like a real prize.” Far from becoming a figure of humanity struggling within the grip of addiction, Disgusting is prone to long, unexplained absences, moonlighting as a pimp when he is present and treating Mona as something of a curiosity. Not only does he break his own alleged sobriety but also introduces Mona to heroin too, a situation which culminates in a casual moment of near-death, where he chooses to observe the result of an overdose rather than help.

The near-death experience is analogous to that of Homes’s Novak, and initiates a similar quest for meaning and self-discovery. Moving to Taos, New Mexico, with a brief detour to steal the miraculous dirt of El Santuario dear Chimayo, Mona starts her own cleaning business and gradually becomes acquainted with a variety of the local people. The role serves as a plot device, allowing Jen Beagin to set up a series of vignettes in which Mona’s idiosyncratic personality can clash with an assortment of weird and wonderful characters, both via direct contact and her constant sifting through the minutiae of their lives when cleaning.

These include, but are not limited to a New Age couple, Yoko and Yoko, who have never heard of David Lynch or Dennis Hopper yet watch the sunset every evening, a psychic named Betty who is in fact so psychic she thinks Mona is called Maura and the mysterious Henry, who is certainly sick, but in just how many ways? The encounters serve the purpose of pushing Mona toward self-acceptance, often by calling to mind her own past, and indeed her relationship with her father is a recurring theme that is dredged up by her present situation.

A fuller version of Mona soon emerges, one apathetic and emotionally-distant not through some hip disaffection but rather the chaos and distrust of her past. The metaphor of cleaning takes on a whole new slant, a constant movement toward purity that is doomed to perpetual action, just as Mona’s attempts to reconnect with herself and others allows long swept memories to surface.

Unlike Homes’s Novak, Jen Beagin’s Mona cannot free herself from cynicism long enough to embrace any potential cure, though there is a similarity in how proximity to bizarre beliefs and lifestyles encourage the development of one’s own. Maybe a full embrace of one’s position and life, contrary to any outside expectation or criticism, is a noble and valuable pursuit. Which is to say, for Mona, perhaps cleaning could have a spiritual function? No book, no psychic seeing, no pyjama-clad, lotus-positioned observance of the setting sun can be sure of saving one’s life. But perhaps the idea can trigger something more practical. Something better than pretending to be dead.

Pretend I’m Dead is out now via OneWorld (UK) and Simon & Schuster (US).

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Sing, Unburied, Sing served as my introduction to Jesmyn Ward, and it quickly became apparent what all the fuss is about. The novel is crafted from distinctive prose that’s at once poetic and blunt, a voice that’s able to capture not just the struggles that exist within families but throughout contemporary America. It pulls off the tricky task of using an intimate study of single family to explore huge themes across several hundred years of history.

Ward is also an expert in creating a sense of place, conjuring the sights and sounds and smells of Mississippi’s Gulf Coast. Some of these evocations are good and rich with a sense of nostalgia, like “the smell of onions and garlic, bell pepper, and celery cooked in butter [that] clouds the air” in the kitchen. But others are not good, a reminder of the harsh realities these characters have to live in. Perhaps the best example of this is the opening scene which depicts the slaughter of a goat, described by the young narrator:

“The smell overwhelms like a faceful of pig shit. It smells like foragers, dead and rotting out in the thick woods, when the only sign of them is the stink and the buzzards rising and settling and circling. It stinks like possums or armadillos smashed half flat on the road, rotting in asphalt and heat. But worse. This smell is worse; it’s the smell of death, the rot coming from something just alive, something hot with blood and life.”

The story centres on Jojo, a thirteen year old boy who’s trying to accelerate his journey into manhood to care for his young sister, and his mother Leonie, who’s locked in eternal struggle with herself, the people around her, and her drug habit. Add to that Pop, Leonie’s stoic father, who is (almost literally) haunted by the tragedy and violence of his youth, and Mam, her mother, who is bedridden with an excruciatingly painful terminal illness. A difficult situation is made worse when the children’s father is released from the prison, and Leonie drags them on a road trip across the state to retrieve him.

The sheer weight of the effects of racism on these characters is crushing, the entirely ordinary and believable people portrayed more like the doomed figures from some ancient epic. On the surface Leonie has few redeeming features, a young woman who shows little love to her children, and who takes every opportunity to take out her anger on them. But, by the end of the story, the reasons for this become clear, and it’s hard to blame her for any of her shortcomings. From personal pain of the sudden death of her brother and the abrupt and uneasy transition into motherhood, to the exhausting daily quest for even a scrap of basic dignity and the momentary relief of drugs, its clear that she is a person, one of many, who is battling against a system that has been designed to keep her in chains.

But, of course, Jojo’s anger at his mother is understandable. He is one of the bravest protagonists of recent times, a boy who is forced to steal food from gas stations and secretly feed it to his famished baby sister, who endures the savage treatment of a suspicious cop, and who is covered in vomit more times than anyone deserves. Through conversations with his grandfather he begins to grasp the the horror and brutality of their cultural history, a revelation that leads to a major plot point near the end of the book, a strand that plays out something like Lincoln in the Bardo meets Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad.

Sing, Unburied, Sing is a tale of hardship and pain that’s stitched with a silvery thread of magic, but perhaps little hope. As Ward says in a Q&A with The Guardian, “Young people have a right to optimism, and rightly so; human beings have grown and developed and accomplished wonderful feats in the world. But what mires me in pessimism is the fact that so much of life is pain and sorrow and willful ignorance and violence, and pushing back against that tide takes so much effort, so much steady fight. It’s tiring.”

It’s out now on Bloomsbury (UK) and Scribner / Simon and Schuster (US).

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