The Yips by Nicola Barker
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Going to be real honest with you, here: I’m not sure what I just read. But I read it, and stayed up all night to finish.
At the beginning of this novel, one of the characters tells a story to another, a real whopper, and then confesses that she was just winding him up, having him on, taking the piss, as they say in Merry Olde. She then goes on to tell another story, more outlandish, more convoluted, more unbelievable than the first. This one turns out to be true.
And the impression I got was that the author, Nicola Barker, just sort of made it up right there on the spot, drawing on her obvious gifts, her creativity and inventiveness and ability to maintain a break-neck momentum. And then the next several chapters were more or less simply drawn from what she had made up.
I can’t say I know this is how the book is written, and, in my opinion, a writer’s process is not a good way to contextualize a critique. But it’s how The Yips feels to me: like stream-of-consciousness, but applied to structure only, with characters added to flesh out the story.
And these characters: the single most egomaniacal golfer on the planet, an eight-times cancer survivor, a flighty but dedicated college girl, the cancer survivor’s radical-turned-C of E cleric wife, the agoraphobic daughter of the woman who the golfer sent into a coma with an errant slice many years ago… I’ve barely scratched the surface of descriptors needed to describe these people, and left out way more characters than I’ve included. Did I say the characters flesh out the novel? This is a novel oozing, dripping with flesh.
And I don’t know what to make of it. Nothing much happens. I mean, a heck of a lot happens. But I don’t know that anything happened. All of it tied together by people getting to know each other rather more quickly than seems real, but stuffed inside Nicola Barker’s force-to-be-reckoned-with writing style, it all makes sense. Except it doesn’t.
Anyway. Longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2012. Worthy of the nomination, I think.