West Virginia’s opulent Greenbrier resort has been a playground for princes and politicians since its opening in 1778. Nestled in the Allegheny Mountain town of White Sulphur Springs, the Greenbrier has expanded over the centuries, growing from a series of summer cottages to a palatial hotel surrounded by gardens and golf courses. So, when the resort broke ground on a new wing in late 1958, no one was surprised.
But observant locals soon noticed something odd about the project. The hole dug for the foundation was enormous, and vast amounts of concrete arrived every day on trucks, along with puzzling items: 110 urinals, huge steel doors. Guards were stationed outside.
So here's a question for you: Is it possible to run on a train roof and leap from one car to the next? Or will the train zoom ahead of you while you're in the air, so that you land behind where you took off? Or worse, would you end up falling between the cars because the gap is moving forward, lengthening the distance you have to traverse? This, my friend, is why stunt actors study physics.
The mindset that slots reading solely as a public act of brand maintenance or a coded invitation to some other interaction is too limiting. And look, if you meet someone over a book, great! If you’re killing time while waiting for someone, great! If you’re trying to be mysterious, that’s great too. But people in public aren’t riddles for you to solve, and not everyone reading at a bar is trying to tell you something.
And yet—for all the inconvenience—walking around the story in this way, I gradually fell in love with it, and the besotted need no convincing. When a writer has surrendered her will to control in pursuit of a more anarchic approach, the reader must do the same, or else set the book aside, go home. Parasol is captivating precisely because it is not believable. Instead, it is aware of itself thinking. But not in an annoying, intellectually domineering way; Oyeyemi is more interested in the imagination’s unjustifiable demands than demonstrations of her own brilliance.
How to Make a Bomb is, at one level, a satire of existentialism, suggesting that Nausea may be an unconscious elegy for the fantasy of white male omnipotence, masquerading as philosophy. It is also a comic novel about radicalisation: a literary Four Lions for the age of the “incel”. Nothing in Notman’s profile would mark him out as a candidate for censure under the UK government’s notorious “Prevent” programme. He is a hapless and inoffensive family man, who for reasons he can’t really explain, wants to blow something up.
The result is a riveting study of a “typical” 20th-century Irish family, one both destroyed and bound together by its secrets. And, in revealing the suffering that accompanies any effort to enforce sexual morality, it serves as a cautionary tale to those who want to uphold chastity and the nuclear family at all costs.