The Unnamed by Joshua Ferris (Viking, £12.99)
Joshua Ferris’s second novel The Unnamed is a book I wish I’d written. He takes an apparently outlandish idea—a mysterious, undiagnosable physical and/or mental condition—and makes us believe in it, care about it, fear it. The story which unfolds is as cruel, dark and daring as it is filled with compassion and insight. It’s a meditation on the frailty of human minds and bodies and, like all the most satisfying novels, it is also ultimately about love, family and the extent to which those things can sustain and survive us. For me, even more exciting than all of that are the risks he takes with his prose. There’s real grace and beauty here, but also a kind of reckless elasticity that keeps on taking you by surprise and seems to push at the boundaries of what language can do.
This article originally appeared in the August 2010 edition of Prospect.
