Small Holdings, by Nicola Barker

A book review this week.

I’m working on my next addiction/recovery/whatever-it-may-be post for next week. I’ll probably keep alternating like this for a while. It seems to work – for me anyway.

Nicola Barker is a bit nuts. She is also funny, insightful, engaging, philosophical, and probably (maybe definitely) a genius. Maybe. But she is nuts. Small Holdings is her second novel and was published in 1995.

The park is not only their workplace, it’s the heart and pulse of their lives. But something isn’t right. It’s coming up to Friday and the very important meeting with the council.

Douglas is in charge of the park and wants to show the council his big idea. But something is wrong with Douglas. Driving a tractor into a greenhouse and destroying it, maybe a bit of a red flag.

Saleem used to work at the park until she lost one of her legs. She’s still there, she shouldn’t be, but she is. She’s terrorising the workforce (such as it is), especially Phil. Saleem wants Douglas out of the way so he doesn’t screw up Friday’s big meeting. She wants Phil to go in his place. Saleem does not work there anymore. But there she is, hassling poor Phil.

Phil doesn’t do meetings, or responsibility, or anything involving pain or responsibility. Phil does plants, trees, flowers, soil, and grass. He is beaten-up, drugged, terrorised, abused, and worst of all, shaved. Phil isn’t happy.

Nancy is the park’s glamorous driver. She has been crashing the van too often lately and Douglas isn’t happy about it. He doesn’t know about her eye, or the gun she keeps in her glove compartment, just in case. Doug wants her gone.
Ray hasn’t many thoughts on anything much. He’s not big on thinking.

Why does Phil keep seeing an old Chinese man stealing onions and dancing in the park? One day, Phil gets a bit too close. Way too close.

This is such a fantastic little novel (or novella, whatever). Nicola Barker writes about loners, eccentrics, and marginalised people in ways that are compelling, witty, and philosophical. This is the best of her work that I’ve read so far. Her style is wonderfully odd and unconventional which adds to her skewed characters and their strange lives.

If you need to engage your brain about the big stuff whilst smiling at the same time, this will help it all happen. Nicola Barker is the mad scientist of British literature. She is brilliant. But nuts.

I wish this review was better, but it’s not. I wish I was hung like a stallion instead of a hamster, but I’m not. I wish I was an extraordinarily talented, mad genius like Nicola Barker, but I’m not. There ya go, them’s the breaks.

This fabulous author has written 13 novels and 2 collections of short stories. Her novel Darkmans was shortlisted for the Man Booker prize in 2007. She has a brand-new novel out this year, Tony Interrupter. I’ll be waiting.

My Year of Rest and Relaxation, by Ottessa Moshfegh

Amazingly, considering all the chaos and sadness that has happened here over the last 12 months, My Year of Rest and Relaxation is the 30th book I’ve managed to read this year. I might just sneak one more in before 2025 if I possibly can. I’m working on a post for next week so I thought I’d share this wonderful book by an author I’d never read before.

By the way. WordPress has just sent me a happy anniversary notification telling me I did my first ever post here, 6 years today! Time flies and all that. Anyway . . .

First published in 2018, this book was (and deservedly still is) an incredible global success.

Stubbornly I didn’t buy it at the time because everyone was all over it (and I was also probably furiously attempting to begin blogging in WordPress for the first time). Also, I hated the original cover with a passion. But things change, just like life, taste, underwear, and book covers.

It’s the year 2000. Our unnamed narrator is blessed with the physical DNA of the gods: young, impossibly beautiful and adored by men and women alike. She’s intelligent, street-wise, smart, and lives in her expensive apartment in Manhattan. Everything is paid for by the inheritance from her dead parents. She has everything a human could possibly desire, apart from happiness. She wants out. She wants to sleep.

She decides to opt out of the everyday facade of life – the mindless chatter of Smalltalk, the fake veneer of the rich and wannabe rich, the dating, the bad sex, the good sex, the inconvenient deaths, and shitty lives of everyone around her. She wants to pull the plug for a year, then she can reevaluate her life.

Enter the very off-kilter and shamanic quack, Dr Tuttle. She offers terrible medical advice but is willing to offer every drug under the sun for cash. Our narrator decides she will never find another ‘professional’ as irresponsible and weird as the drug-pushy Dr Tuttle, and sees her as the only hope to her year-long oblivion.

She loses her job at the art gallery because of all the naps taken in the utility cupboard. She leaves her crappy boss a ‘present’ like no other.

Pills are popped like toxic candy. Drifting in and out of consciousness, she watches VHS tapes of terrible films. She idolises Whoopi Goldberg. Her long-suffering friend, Reva is her only visitor. Bulimic, materialistic and stuck in a bad relationship, Reva babbles away about her terrible life. Although our narrator treats her like garbage, she is oddly soothed by her whining, sisterly presence.

Eventually, Dr Tuttle prescribes the drug Infermiterol, and the rest and Relaxation descends into a zombified, blackout chaos of not knowing what went on: the night, the day, or the week before. But eventually, the sleep finally comes.

If you took the murders out of Brett Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, you wouldn’t be a million miles away from the satirical nihilism of this book. The sarcasm, cruelty and the black humour are high here. Oddly, I found the last chapter quite heartbreaking.

Ottessa Moshfegh is an incredibly engaging and gifted writer. She renders her off-the-wall and unlikable characters beautifully on the page. Razor sharp and biting. Moshfegh does gallows humour exceptionally well (actually, she’s hilarious). Now I need to read more of her work. Highly recommended!