Slags by Emma Jane Unsworth review – a riotous roadtrip

On the archetypal greeting of their vacation unneurotic successful a distant portion of Scotland, 42-year-old Sarah convinces her younger sister, Juliette, to clamber connected to the extortion of their mobile location for a amended telephone signal. Juliette has 3 layers of tinfoil wrapped astir her limbs and a tinfoil cone chapeau plonked connected her caput earlier she clocks that she’s fallen for a prank. It’s a pleasing spot of sibling slapstick successful Slags, the caller caller from Emma Jane Unsworth astir desire, dissatisfaction and the ferocious loyalty of sisters. And sisterhood, arsenic Unsworth writes it here, is an unbreakable transportation for which nary prank antenna is needed.

When Sarah takes Juliette connected a Highland roadworthy travel for her day they find themselves revealing secrets and reckoning with their younger selves. Candid and comic, Slags is Thelma & Louise with a campervan and without a clifftop. There are shades of Fleabag, too, successful the fractious sisters, the intersexual escapades of 1 countered by the suburban righteousness of the other.

The caller focuses connected Sarah, with chapters alternating betwixt her teenage self, obsessing implicit a teacher successful a desperately pining first-person confessional, and the big woman, who puzzles implicit the percolations of midlife tendency (narrated by an older, omniscient authorial voice). The present-day Sarah is single, sardonic, bored with sobriety. She lives successful London, wherever nary 1 seems to enactment immoderate much and “everyone was reasoning astir their gut health, oregon their crochet, oregon the authorities of the economy”.

Juliette, by contrast, is joined with children, and lives successful Manchester. Her husband, Johnnie, is into crystal plunges and Andrew Huberman podcasts. Unsworth is particularly merciless successful her representation of a peculiar benignant of modern masculinity, captured present successful each its absurdity. “Longevity seemed pointless,” Sarah reflects, “when you were arsenic tedious arsenic Johnnie.” Johnnie doesn’t person overmuch of a relation successful the novel, but it’s often done the insignificant characters, those simply glanced astatine in the rear-view mirror, that Unsworth demonstrates the sharpness of her perceptions.

Deanna, Sarah and Juliette’s mother, for instance, lone periodically swings into view. She is simply a fleeting representation of neglect – abandoning her young daughters connected a broken-down train, stumbling into a enactment humiliatingly drunk – but Unsworth allows her to formed a agelong shadow. Later, Sarah reflects much forgivingly connected her mother’s abortive efforts to flight suburban life and “the stocks of domesticity”. Suburbia, successful general, is efficiently demolished here, reduced to “bin wars, magnolia histrion one-upmanship, ceramic drives, thorax freezers, treble garages, weedkiller, Chicken Tonight successful Le Creuset, Laura Ashley successful perpetuity.”

Sarah wants nary of it, but her occupation and her beingness successful the metropolis besides permission her empty. Unsworth describes however “late astatine night, aft video calls with the East Coast of America, she often stayed connected arsenic a host, alone, successful those abandoned Zoom rooms, her ain look staring backmost astatine her, the glow of the ring-light arsenic hygge arsenic immoderate wood-burning stove, sipping a solid of thing moderately alcoholic, feeling a dystopian bid …” It’s not rather loneliness, much a beauteous desolation. “I don’t privation to benignant my beingness out,” she tells Juliette during a heated drunken argument. When Juliette protests “But you consciousness bad”, she replies: “Only sometimes …”

One of Sarah’s distinguishing qualities is this deficiency of clarity astir what it is that she desires. She belongs, arsenic she explains, to gen X, that “lost generation”, excessively young to beryllium old, excessively aged to beryllium millennial, sexually liberated and yet inactive searching for something. Where Unsworth captured the erratic hedonism of twentysomethings successful her 2014 caller Animals and the online dysfunctions of thirtysomethings successful 2020’s Adults, present she plumbs the muddles of midlife. Sarah is simply a uncommon pistillate character: she’s not a mother, but neither is she afloat of fraught questions astir fertility oregon menopause. She is, instead, frank astir “getting her rocks off” and the trouble of however to bash that without the aid of portion oregon drugs.

How to contend with intersexual tendency is a question for the 15-year-old Sarah, too. She shrugs disconnected unhappy intersexual encounters, including an acquisition of indecent exposure, with a swaggering bravado. How that shapes the big Sarah’s cognition to enactment is not straightforward, and there’s an quality successful Unsworth’s refusal to contiguous wide origin and effect. Comedy, alternatively than tragedy, is the effect she astir often prefers. Perhaps this is symptomatic of the Fleabagification of women’s stories – wherever farce someway feels much truthful than straight-up trauma. Is drama a deflection oregon a pragmatic attack to getting connected with things successful a satellite of misunderstanding and confusion? Certainly, Slags culminates successful a confrontation that is much chaotic than climactic. But this is an undeniably amusive read, the levity often lifted by an underlying consciousness of sympathy, affection and tenderness. Unsworth is riotous, rewarding company.