Deeply not at home

These two novels are both strong in their sense of locale, and take their settings as part of the subject, linked to pictures of isolation and barely functioning relationships, and with catastrophe not averted.

Tuvalu, by Andrew O’Connor, not yet in his thirties, is set in Japan, so the alienation is perhaps part of the given. Noah Tuttle teaches English semi-competently to semi-interested Japanese businessmen (the set-up, with its cubicles in which you never meet the same student twice, sounds like a cross between a call centre and a massage parlour). Noah’s only friend is a vain, arrogant model called Patrick, whom he doesn’t like very much. His girlfriend is in Australia; while she is away, he gets mixed up with a wayward rich Japanese woman, Mami, who does what she wants and says what she likes and never feels guilty. She is frankly toying with him, happy to tell him that his appeal for her is that he is from somewhere else – not just geographically but socially hopeless, and thus an easy mark. Noah tepidly puts up a fight and allows himself to be walked over by Mami, who seems to have come straight out of one of those ‘cruel story of youth’ movies that the Japanese made with such style in the 1960s. Meanwhile, his family life in Australia is disintegrating.