The Homeless Heart -Throb
Crystal Jeans (Honno)
This, Crystal Jeans’ third book – feels like a novel to me, but could be classified as a collection of short stories; indeed, some parts of it have previously been published in that form – succeeds The Vegetarian Tigers Of Paradise and Light Switches Are My Kryptonite. Both of those were decorated with glowing reviews and heavyweight points of comparison, yet there’s a nagging feeling that the mildly wacky titles, and the Young Adult-style jacket design, sell this Cardiff writer short. Jeans (to treat her pseudonym with formality) is a serious storyteller – not in the sense of grave solemnity, but by way of perfectly-pitched dialogue, eminently believable characters and a Persian rug-weaver’s yen for threading together narratives.
The Homeless Heart-Throb is set in Cardiff, the streets and venues denoting this a curious mix of actual and invented, although the location of either plot or reader isn’t hugely important. Events take place between 1995 and 2013, and are linked not only by the homeless heart-throb himself but by pervasive social dysfunction. Jeans’ characters – her people, you imagine, this reading very much like a book borne of lived experience – drink or otherwise ingest too much, navigate or suppress disapproved sexualities and find coping mechanisms for their toxic families. It’s frequently very funny, without needing to loudly advertise its moments of wit, and draws you in sufficiently to make outrage or grossness seem calmly normal. If these reviews had star ratings, though, it’d lose one for a scene where someone discusses buying “meow meow” in 2006.
NOEL GARDNER
Price: £8.99. Info: www.honno.co.uk
