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Notes -
Last year my fiancée and I both read Eliza Clark's Boy Parts, which I thoroughly enjoyed (it was my third-favourite novel I read last year). A few months ago I bought her Clark's sophomore effort, Penance; she told me she enjoyed it, albeit not as much as Boy Parts. I started reading it on my commute this morning. It follows a muckraking journalist writing a true-crime book about a teenaged girl brutally murdered by three schoolmates in a small seaside town in the summer of 2016.
I'm thirty pages in and I'm enjoying it so far, although sadly the few tics and flourishes I found distracting in Boy Parts remain intact in the followup. Clark is a white Millennial Englishwoman who is Very Online and whom I presume had a middle-class upbringing: accordingly, her every waking moment is sodden with terror of getting cancelled for being insufficiently woke. (In the chapter in which the muckraking journalist introduces himself to the reader, he describes how getting cancelled in a Twitter pile-on temporarily derailed his career – something on your mind, dear?) To avert this fate, Clark interrupts her lengthy passages of sharply observed character details and pinpoint-accurate observations of British class dynamics with chunks of boilerplate, calcified woke orthodoxy e.g. going out of her way to mention that the "majority right-leaning" UK media largely ignored the girl's murder: the victim and three perpetrators all being white Britons, the case couldn't be cynically pinned on a grooming gang or an immigrant. It feels defensive and out of place, as if added just before publication at the behest of a sensitivity reader. C'mon Clark, show your power level already!
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