Gunk by Saba Sams: book review
Overview: Jules is accustomed to strange situations. After a hen do takes her to a student bar as a twenty-eight-year-old woman in Brighton, she meets the club owner, starts working at the bar, and eventually marries him. They're together for years before they divorce, but Jules keeps working at the club. During their marriage, Jules never gets the baby she so desperately wants. Then Nim, nineteen and the adult version of a teenage runaway, comes into the picture and offers Jules a very strange, roundabout way to having a child. That journey is what constitutes Gunk. Overall: 4.5
Characters: 4 Jules and Nim and Leon are interesting character sketches that feel both very human and also watery and impressionistic. Leon is an addict who likes to pick up students at the bar. He's scummy and provides a constant low hum of disaster in the background. Jules has never had great love in her life, and what she feels with Nim isn't quite that either. It's neither romantic nor platonic, but it is charged and intense. Jules narrates the book, but we manage to see her refracted through Nim's gaze, not quite as in control of her life or her emotions as she pretends to be. Nim, too, is a newly minted adult prone to chaos, who never feels quite tethered. Jules struggles with how exactly to conceptualize her and does a fair amount of casting her own views onto Nim in an effort to make sense of their strange situation.
Plot: 5 The book moves quickly. It's more a character sketch than anything, but there's an inherent tension from the opening that Jules is holding a brand new, vulnerable baby having to figure out how to be a mother when Nim, having just given birth, has just run away. Then we flash between small moments with the baby and the entire arc of her relationship with Nim that led up to this. They're mostly sketched vignettes that reveal internal aspects of everyone involved. The pacing is fast enough to make this work, and the portraits it leaves behind are gorgeous.
Minor Spoiler: The phone call at the end made me think of Conversations with Friends in a way. Contextually very different but an interesting use of the same device—the suggestion of circularity and that the end of the book is far from the end of the character breaking the loop.
Writing: 4 The writing here is what makes the book. If it wasn't so beautiful, the novel simply wouldn't work. I did notice, though, that in the last few chapters as Sams aimed to tie up the loose ends and make the grand thematic statements that the reader is meant to walk away with, it felt like we fell out of Jules's voice, even in the first person, and tripped into Sams's authorial voice. This was an interesting, strange gnat hum as I read these last few pages, just a feeling I couldn't articulate fully. I'd never experienced this in the first person novel. I think it worked fine because it was so isolated, but it did distract me as the book came in for the landing.
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