Book review: Pretentious and sex-obsessed internal monologues in debut novel How To Leave The House

How To Leave The House

By Nathan Newman
Fiction/Abacus Books/Hardcover/320 pages/$46.28/Amazon SG (amzn.to/4bWaDw3)
2 stars

Natwest spends his last day before he leaves home for university chasing a deeply embarrassing package before it is opened by the wrong person. As he races through town, he encounters people whose lives are tangled with his in some manner or another.

A debut novel by London-based writer and film-maker Nathan Newman, it is an ambitious attempt to weave multiple lives and perspectives into a thoughtful story about what identity and love mean amid the lies the characters tell themselves.

However, many of the perspectives and subplots are lost while Natwest runs frantically around town, lost in his own selfishness.

Two plotlines mentioned in the blurb receive so little attention that they are nearly forgettable.

There is a single chapter about a quasi-romantic entanglement between an imam and a vicar. It turns out to be nothing more than an entitled man imagining a woman returned his affections, when she was merely offering friendship.

An elderly woman grieving the death of her secretive husband is given one chapter before being abandoned until a later chapter, which glosses over the shocking end of the octogenarian.

An uncomfortable thread across all the chapters is the sex-obsessed nature of many characters, who chronicle their bedroom lives with more detail than necessary and little relevance to their overall plotline.

Natwest’s mother Penny vividly recounts her youthful trysts, English-language teacher Ms Pandey laments not having a partner to satisfy her intense desires after surviving cancer and Natwest describes one too many explicit encounters in a selfish manner. A particularly disturbing and uncomfortable account involves his discovery of lewd images of Penny.

Knowledge of the photos, along with not knowing the identity of his father, leads Natwest to often mistreat Penny, being curt and raising his voice easily as some form of immature retribution he deems necessary.

After he leaves the house in search of his package, Penny laments to herself: “Then it dawned on her that he was never going to come back home; that Natwest’s plan for his final day had nothing to do with her.”

The novel later attempts to give Natwest a thin layer of maturity when he poorly comforts Lily, a teen girl agonising over her nude photos being exposed online. However, the interaction is awkward and uncomfortable on all accounts, barely helping Lily in any way.

Pretentious inner monologues by Natwest and Lily fill their respective chapters, easily crossing the line into annoyance, particularly as Natwest acts as if he knows better than anyone else in the world ever could.

During his quest for his package, Natwest says of his tendency to be well-liked: “He supposed it was due to his impressive knowledge of the world, because he could talk about anything, especially if it related to the arts. He liked to think of himself as a kaleidoscope given consciousness.”

Pitched as a humorous story about the connections between people, it comes off more like a pretentious mess. It is perhaps the result of Newman being 26 years old and craving for more profound meaning from life and art, as most young adults do, while searching for a place in the world.

If you like this, read: The Sun Is Also A Star by Nicola Yoon (Delacorte Press, 2016, $15.18, Amazon SG, go to amzn.to/3VkUM50). Told in alternating perspectives, two teenagers fall in love over 24 hours in New York City as one fights against being deported and the other reckons with the demands of family and cultural expectations.