His life is mostly told via excerpts from an unpublished memoir, written by Vincent, an old friend. Early on, we are told that Damien Hirst was hit by a train in 1989 and killed, allowing the art world’s attention to fall on Randall, a strange kind of artist with a vast body of work. The novel charts an alternative history of the British art scene, in particular the YBAs (Young British Artists). Everything else – talking about it, thinking about it, selling it, looking at it – either comes under one of those two, or doesn’t count.” His debut novel Randall, or The Painted Grape (Galley Beggars Press) is an extremely funny satire of the dirty business of art curation, archiving, buying and selling: “There’s only two things you can do with art: make it, and buy it. There’s nothing uncertain about the funny and dirty business that is the contemporary art world – something Jonathan Gibbs knows all too well.
Steeped in uncertainties, blank spaces and philosophical questions concerning the nature of fiction and truth itself, this novel makes for important reading for those who like to speculate on what the contemporary novel has the potential to become. It’s also one of those special novels that leaves the reader with a desire to read it again and again. Mira Corpora is an architecture of memory, violence and desire. It’s the sort of smell you can only fully register in the back of your throat as you start to gag.” There’s a perfume-like undercurrent, a sweet tang that’s briny. A mixture of the raw and the curdled: Overripe fruit and mold spores singed hair and meat rot fresh blood and smeared shit. As the flames blacken the boards and catch the corpse, they unleash a consuming odor. Here’s Jackson on the smell of a burning corpse, for example: “Then the stench. It’s an anti-coming-of-age story for the forgotten – those children society, for whatever reason, has cast aside with added venom – that hits the reader in fits and bursts, employing a voice so poetically brutal and visceral. First published in the US, this unsettling novel charts the young life of Jeff, a runaway who isn’t quite sure what he’s running from. Jeff Jackson’s Mira Corpora (The Friday Project) uses this powerful tool to extreme effect. Each deals with its own idiosyncratic concerns and themes, but the books share a powerful common denominator: voice. Three rather extraordinary debut novels were published recently.
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