Revolutionary Road was Richard Yates’ first novel, published in 1961. It tells the story of Frank and April Wheeler, who live a typical suburban life in 1950s America. They seem to have been sucked into a vacuous sort of existence, which they dream of escaping by moving to Paris.

So is this book a satire on 1950s American values? Well I wasn’t sure. There are plenty of references to boring working lives in the service of buying houses and ice-cream coloured cars. On the other hand there are some personal decisions going on here too. When Frank leaves university he chooses to take a boring, undemanding job in a business equipment firm, because that would leave him free to concentrate his attention on other more important work in his spare time. The thing is he never gets round to the painting, sculpture, composing, or writing to which his spare time was meant to be devoted. Does Frank blame society for a sort of personal laziness?

Revolutionary Road isn’t just a satire on 1950s American values, with America empty and materialistic while Paris represents some unachieved creative nirvana. In America or Paris, you just have to get on with some creative stuff. Maybe Frank Wheeler is the book’s author Richard Yates, if Richard hadn’t knuckled down in his home office and got on with his writing. In a way this bleak book offers grudging encouragement. You are where you are, and wherever that is offers an opportunity at fulfilment. You too can create a beautifully written, compelling, complex book like Revolutionary Road. That’s what I took from it, before getting on with some editing.

Enlightenment by Sarah Perry is a Booker Prize nominated novel published in 2024.

Thomas Hart, a journalist on a local newspaper in Essex, becomes fascinated by astronomy after his editor asks him to write a column on the subject. With a museum official, he investigates a nineteenth century woman, a past resident of a nearby country house, who may have been a keen amateur astronomer, and unacknowledged discoverer of a comet. The story follows Thomas’s investigations, and his attempts to accommodate religious feelings with both his scientific interests and the austere church he attends, which obliges him to hide the fact that he is gay.

This book is much concerned with making it appear that science and religion are not at odds in exploring life’s unknowns.

Was it persuasive? Well I don’t know. Some of the science religion parallels were certainly interesting. There was the irony of a rigid church dealing in universal mysteries, reminiscent of the apparently rigid business of science revealing all kinds of weird stuff, like enigmatic, shape shifting electrons that seem to be in two different places at the same time, (don’t ask) and a universe so vast that you can’t get your head around it. That said, I also felt the theme felt forced. Late in the book Thomas Hart ponders on a quote dubiously attributed to scientist Werner Heisenberg, of the famous Uncertainty Principle.

“At the first sip of the natural sciences you will become an atheist – then at the bottom of the glass God will be waiting for you.”

Thomas admits the attribution to Heisenberg might not be correct. From what I can see, doing an internet search, it’s almost certainly incorrect. This use of a very dubious quote to equate science and religion was indicative of straining too hard around this equivalence idea.

The book was better for me in the first half, poetic in its descriptions of astronomical phenomena up there in the sky above Essex. The second half was harder work. And as I say, the main theme sometimes seemed forced. Science revealing uncertainty is not the same as science revealing God, which seems to be the implication.

Wandering Stars is a 2024 novel by Tommy Orange, nominated for the Booker Prize.

This is a book by an author of Native American descent about the destruction of Native American culture by European settlers. We see this process taking place over successive generations from the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre, up to the 2020s.

The first and perhaps most interesting thing about Wandering Stars is that it’s a novel, self-consciously so, using many kinds of novel writing techniques – frequent changes of viewpoint, switches between third, first and even second person narration. The native tribes of north America did not have novels. Reading and writing were something Europeans brought with them. Reading is part of the regime of assimilation we see at work in a facility in Florida, something which massacre survivor Jude Star comes to love, amongst all the things he hates about what is imposed upon him. So a book about the destruction of native culture is itself a cultural form involved in its loss.

For me the interest of the novel comes out of this basic irony. The book certainly makes clear the tragedy of a people having their culture destroyed. But from that starting point, we get a very nuanced look at what culture and identity might mean. Confined to the Florida correctional facility, Jude Star is forced to read the Bible. He notes that the creation myth described in Genesis is similar to tribal myths, suggesting archetypes common to all people. The things that define us actually turn out to define other people too. For a book about loss of identity, Wandering Stars is surprisingly revealing about how indefinable that lost identity was. Native American society had no uniformity. Many hundreds of tribes each had their own languages, customs and varying ways of life. Cultural identity, apparently such an important thing to people, starts to evaporate once you try to pin it down. The people in the book who are really hardline about cultural identity are white supremacists – hardly a good advert for taking such a fundamentalist stance.

Reading Wandering Stars can be hard work, given all the point of view switches. You are not a passenger in this novel, carried along by an immersive reading experience. Maybe that’s useful given the context. Readers don’t just submissively receive. They have to be part of the effort perhaps? I thought the required effort was well worthwhile.