The plot of Naomi Booth's debut novel is structured around experiences that might make someone faint or swoon. Still very much worth spending time with though. It feels like lots of things, brimming with potential and verve, rather than a coherent whole.
Esther seems to be building towards some grand gesture or performance, picking her moment for the perfect swoon, yet she’s easily derailed from her purpose by a rapid and overly neat ending. Places and scenarios come into view and then disappear.
Characters and incidents burn bright and then fizzle out. Each is really interesting in its own right Booth excels at atmospheres of alienation and ambivalence. A series of linked vignettes follows her through university and then to a dead end job in London, with flings and dangerous one night stands along the way. It focuses on the perspective of Esther, a young woman obsessed with fainting, who spends years trying to replicate the perfect shape of her mother’s dying swoon. It’s a haunting, beautifully eloquent piece, and hints at the quality of the writing to come, but it felt a little too fragmented.
I loved Naomi Booth’s recent novel Sealed and was keen to pick up her debut novella.
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