“Do I flatten you?” the narrator of Gunk asks the woman bearing her child. At this point of the novel I answered internally: yes. Nineteen-year-old Nim has agreed to see through a pregnancy caused by a one-night stand and then give the baby to the older, divorced protagonist, Jules: “I just think: you want a baby and I’ve got one. It makes sense.”
It doesn’t, and the narrator’s acknowledgement (“It makes no sense at all”) does nothing to offset this reader’s early scepticism. But we’re building towards a deeper, more plausible motive – one I won’t spoil. Sams knows what she’s about in making Nim’s rationale so hard to swallow. It creates suspense we must keep reading to resolve.
Behind these women there’s a man in the background: Leon. Jules divorced him five years ago after he cheated on her constantly with the students frequenting his dive bar. He is the father of Nim’s child, at least biologically.
There are no mysteries surrounding Leon. We understand how society has enabled his narcissism: “The whole world was kind to men. The whole world spoiled them.” His psyche lends itself to one-line summaries: “He’d take any pity, any disgust, so long as his name was on another’s lips.”
The women’s personalities emerge more slowly, largely through how they relate to others. We intuit that Jules must have charisma from how others throw themselves at her, though she remains oblivious to her powers. Nim comes to us first through awed descriptions of how well she does her job at the bar, and we patch together her complexity through a series of vulnerable confessions.
Those used to being tiptoed around often prove easier to pin down. It took me longer to feel I had a grasp on the women, but this reflects the subtlety with which they must operate compared with Leon.
The prose grew on me, too. There are rough edges – long successions of sentences beginning with “I”, unvaried repetition of details such as Nim’s shaved head or the height difference between her and Leon – but they suit the narrator’s unfurnished inner life. She’s not speaking to impress but to witness.
Gunk is an elusive, idiosyncratic book that I would not want to have been written any differently. It deals in relationships that literary conventions were not built to hold. “There’s no format for this, so we have no choice but to make it up”, concludes the narrator. I wish Jules and Nim the best of luck.
