Portraying the struggles of rich kids whose creative ambitions are supported by family wealth will always be an endeavour fraught with pitfalls, but Amber Medland’s smart and funny debut leans into the risk and reaps the reward, expertly treading the fine line between sending up her cast and taking their plight seriously.
Londoners Iris and Ezra, who met at Oxford, are at a crossroads in their relationship. He’s going on tour with his band, about to hit the big time (thanks to a leg-up from someone’s dad), while she’s off to New York to work on a book about salt on a creative writing course – a course of action Iris is trying to persuade herself isn’t just marking time, as Ezra’s silences grow and he embraces the perks of stardom.
A novel like this only works if it can persuade us of the chemistry between its lead characters. As we watch the ensuing long-distance relationship falter over Skype, Medland succeeds brilliantly in conveying the depth of feeling that lies behind the growing awkwardness and idle chat, setting up the emotional punch of the novel’s second half as Iris sinks into depression – a spiral perhaps worryingly common to her generational counterparts, from the protagonist of Raven Leilani’s Luster to Megan Nolan’s Acts of Desperation.
The action unfolds against the backdrop of Trump’s election campaign and subsequent tenure. While the business of putting headlines into a novel can risk seeming ersatz, there’s a rare authenticity to Medland’s portrait of how many of us consume news now, as Iris and her Irish friend Nance, who has stayed at Oxford for a PhD, swap email links and WhatsApp messages about the Weinstein scandal or the US border crisis.
The effect is a kind of technology-enabled campus novel, peculiarly timely in the lockdown era. As a protagonist, Iris feels fresh – a character at home everywhere and nowhere, as comfortable in Poundland as she is in a New York dive bar, viewed as British in the US but (on account of her Indian heritage) as a foreigner in England. Medland’s deadpan prose generates momentum by cutting out the connective tissue, although there’s nothing slack about it, as she often tosses out picture-perfect descriptions with casual brilliance (here’s the view from the stage at one of Ezra’s gigs: “So many piercings it looks like a handful of ball bearings has been flung out...”).
Enjoyably arch without trivialising its themes – from mental illness to the difficulty of living in the shadow of someone else’s fame – Wild Pets is an instant set text of the emerging canon of millennial fiction.
• Wild Pets by Amber Medland is published by Faber (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
