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Wohl’s novel about a taboo relationship takes the style of contemporaries such as Sally Rooney and gives it new twists
A woman in her late 30s asks her much older partner for a six-week pause in the relationship. She wants to do nothing in the sun; to have other lovers without having to account for herself. She returns home to New York after only a single one-night stand with a man with a vomiting fetish, grateful to come back to the touch of the man she missed. He tells her he has fallen in love with another woman.
These are the scenes with which the American writer Isobel Wohl’s debut novel, published by new indie Weatherglass, begins. It’s as though Wohl has awarded this great, classic plot to herself as a pleasurable question, like Henry James does with Isabel Archer’s inheritance in The Portrait of a Lady. In both cases the novelist steps back and asks: what will she do next? Continue reading...