The ObserverFiction This article is more than 2 years oldReviewThree Rooms by Jo Hamya review – some room of one’s own, please
This article is more than 2 years oldA young woman struggles to find a home and stable job in a smart and acerbic debut that inverts the coming-of-age arc
Set during the pre-Brexit tumult that did for Theresa May and anointed Boris Johnson, this cerebral and slyly caustic debut is told by an unnamed young woman of colour who, born under the New Labour mantra of “education, education, education”, belongs to a hyper-qualified yet precariously employed cohort that has found itself having to foot the bill for the recklessness of a deregulated banking industry. All she wants is a stable job and a place of her own. Yet, three degrees down the line, it remains a pipe dream – something she refuses to accept.
We meet her as she moves into a student residence at Oxford for a short-term contract as a postdoctoral research assistant in English. Later, she lands a job as subeditor on a London society magazine resembling Tatler (where, the dust jacket tells us, Hamya once worked), using up her day rate to rent someone’s sofa while ignoring her mother’s pleas to move back home or, as she sees it, give up.
As in Ali Smith’s Summer and Will Burns’s The Paper Lantern, both set during the first lockdown, verbatim snatches of headlines and speeches waft through the text, from backstop quarrels to Johnson’s leadership victory address, preserving the recent past as if to assure us the last three years weren’t some kind of collective hallucination. The narrative itself – part campus novel, part office satire – unspools largely as a sinuously discursive meditation comprising the narrator’s tart exchanges with other mostly unnamed characters, from a Leave-voting fellow postdoc to a senior colleague who patronisingly recalls railing against Thatcher (“all I see from your generation is a lot of shouting on Twitter”).
Her reflexive despair over Brexit is subjected to a withering scrutiny that we aren’t invited to dismiss out of handAlthough you always sense the various interlocutors are being sent up (“‘You’re BAME’”, someone at Oxford tells her, “with great solemnity”), the novel’s cool electricity relies on stress-testing every point of view it portrays, and the protagonist isn’t immune. Her reflexive despair over Brexit, not to mention her self-perception as an outsider in the ruling-class spaces she inhabits, are subjected to a withering scrutiny that we aren’t invited to dismiss out of hand; despite an ever-present anxiety about the internet (“a constant, useless distress in my pocket”), the novel’s structure, made up of successively clinching arguments, embodies the tit-for-tat checkmates of online discourse.
Another influence, you suspect, is Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy; yet one feels, too, that Hamya wants to draw attention to the blind spots in Cuskian analyses of unfree womanhood, which – the novel suggests – have little to say to non-property-owning millennials. It’s telling when, too broke to socialise, the narrator reads a novel brought home by her bookseller flatmate, in which a woman “equated the dishevelment of her inner life with the renovation of her house for 260 pages”, which sounds a lot like Cusk’s Transit. There’s also mention of a vogue for nonfiction “in which the author found kinship with a writer, usually dead, usually with a legacy of radical politics... whose legacies now functioned in the machinations of north London suburbia”.
Impish self-positioning, maybe, but – as Hamya’s narrator finds her bid to strike out alone repeatedly thwarted, venturing into the world only to find there isn’t a place in it – the point ultimately seems to be freedom and autonomy aren’t states of mind so much as brute functions of wealth. The upshot is an almost aggressively pessimistic inversion of the traditional coming-of-age arc, which takes its place among a recent crop of fiction centred on millennial experience. From racism (Natasha Brown’s Assembly) to sexual abuse (Rebecca Watson’s Little Scratch) and self-harm (Megan Nolan’s Acts of Desperation), the picture seems far from healthy, and while you might well wonder what is up with this generation, perhaps it’s time to listen.
Three Rooms by Jo Hamya is published by Jonathan Cape (£12.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbTEoKyaqpSerq96wqikaJqfpLi0e5FpaWpnmqq5cH2XaKuhqpWaerO7zqaqZpqpYreweceapLKZXaeyt7XEsGSsp52aerO7zqZkqJ5dpLumv4yorqdloKGyor%2FE