The unnamed 28-year-old narrator of Avigayl Sharp’s debut novel teaches literature at a girls’ boarding school in the US, and is not OK. She has lost touch with her friends, is hooked on prescription stimulants and cries too easily. She is also sexually uptight, which she attributes to childhood trauma, and weirdly obsessed with Joseph Stalin (“his brutality, and his paranoia, reminded me very much of my mother”).
The pupils at the school are brittle and entitled. One of them opines: “This guy Kafka kept acting like everything was out of his control … I thought, why don’t you take a little initiative, buddy?” Another “let her head drop back against the window, exhausted from the effort of speech” after uttering three sentences in a class discussion. They’re not terribly keen on reading – “due to the devastating psychic effects of daily technological overstimulation” – so she assigns them Charles Dickens’s 900-page novel, Bleak House.
Offseason is a wryly funny portrait of an enervated psyche. The narrative voice is deadpan to the point of absurdity. (“I am having a series of lucid and penetrating thoughts, I thought.”) Intense, improbably one-sided conversations play out in banal contexts, like a sendup of Rachel Cusk’s Outline. On learning that the school’s handyman is Bulgarian, the narrator – who is of eastern European Jewish heritage – offloads at length on intergenerational trauma. She thinks it might explain her mother’s “mania for purchasing obscene quantities of designer purses on clearance … then forcing me to observe and praise each one in exaggerated terms, after which she would narrow her eyes and accuse me of wanting her to die so I could have all of the purses”.
This mother-daughter dynamic is highlighted when she goes to stay with her parents during the end-of-term break that gives the novel its title. Some deliciously awkward exchanges attest to her mother’s problematic nature, but the narrator also reveals that she herself had been a compulsive liar as a child, which suggests her memories might not be reliable. Meanwhile her father helpfully intones: “Jewish people like your mother have intolerable histories, due to the Holocaust, fleeing the Soviet Union for the nation of Israel, cruel parents, estranged sisters, and other miscellaneous factors.”
The glib, on-the-nose quality of this pronouncement gently lampoons the rich tradition – in which this novel also resides – of fiction that explores the nexus of personal neuroticism and collective experience. Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint springs to mind, as well as more recent titles such as Katharina Volckmer’s The Appointment and Will Self’s Quantity Theory of Morality. Sharp’s protagonist is certainly neurotic, and neurotically fixated on delineating the hierarchies of causality that made her so. She brings these preoccupations into the classroom, much to the bewilderment of her young charges. “I wrote ‘Trauma Olympics – what if good?’ on the whiteboard.” Tellingly, however, she never seems fully on board with the intellectual ideas and discursive frameworks she invokes, and is more vigorously incisive when saying it straight: “My parents did not have intimate friendships, due to their limited attention spans and terrible personalities”.
Sometimes people are maladjusted for reasons that are destined to remain obscure, and the myriad strange and delightful ways in which that manifests might actually be more compelling than the originating causes. Offseason skewers, simultaneously and with plenty of droll wit, several commonplace tropes in recent literary fiction: the pat complacency of the trauma plot; the gooey sentimentalism of the immigrant experience novel; the narcissism of autofiction; the heavy foregrounding of theme at the expense of texture.
Sharp’s frazzled narrator is a 21st-century downgrade on Muriel Spark’s Miss Jean Brodie. Unlike her, she’s on a temporary contract, and lacks the courage of her convictions, preferring to wallow in the comforts of comic bathos. Her predicament makes her an avatar for our increasingly beleaguered humanities, embattled by funding cuts, culture wars and smartphone-induced brain rot. In such a climate, teaching American teenagers about Dickens’s London may indeed feel like a sisyphean task. (One of her pupils asks: “Is fog going to be on the exam?”) Offseason’s narrative arc echoes that sense of futility – the novel builds to an elliptical anticlimax – but when the journey is this fun, the destination hardly matters.
• Offseason by Avigayl Sharp is published by W&N (£18.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
