First impressions

I've just read, at the suggestion of a fan at Faber, The Flying Troutmans by Miriam Toews, an author about whom I know nothing. I wouldn't say I was smitten but I was certainly quietly impressed by an author who can make a simple, and in many ways overfamiliar, story into something fresh. It's a variation on the great American road trip and its concomitant personal enlightenment, but it eschews the wearisome pretensions which started with Kerouac and have had their exponents in every generation since.

Two children - well, young teenagers - are taken to find their drop-out father by their aunt, when their disturbed mother is taken into hospital; initially, I had visions of yet another attempt to ape A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. But Toews' attention to detail and dry wit allow the interplay between Thebes, Logan and their aunt to give a plausible portrait of the entire family dynamic and how it has come to where the book begins and then travels. Few writers do children or teenagers well, crediting them with more adult psychologies than seems plausible, but the slight precocity of both children is given backstory and context. It reminded me of The Outcast in that respect.

Even if I can't quite bring myself to recommend this book wholeheartedly, Toews is a thoughtful writer, who resists the temptation to smear her ego all over the text. She's written an anti-Beat novel, I suppose.

German literature, meanwhile, is embracing 'the new impressionism'. Supposedly, How The Soldier Repairs the Gramophone by Saša Stanišić (he's actually Bosnian, but now lives and writes in Germany) is in the vanguard, but I felt he fell into every trap which Toews was able to step over with so little fuss. It's a mish-mash of snapshots and episodes, the cumulative effect of which is to convey the brutal intrusion of sectarian conflict and its corruption of human decency, but I really felt it needed a bit more narrative backbone. Thumbnail sketches result in little more than the imprint of character.

Stanišić is endlessly inventive and the novel has innumerable great set-pieces, but the trickery starts to wear thin long before the end. I'm all for style over content when the writer has imagination and originality to pull it off - and, in this case, it may be that some of the dazzle is dulled by translation - but the hype with which this book was heralded ultimately does it a disservice. He's one to watch too, but no more.