GUNK, by Saba Sams
The defining novel of Brighton, the seaside resort city a two hour’s drive south of London, is Graham Greene’s “Brighton Rock” (1938). Greene was attracted by the pebble beaches, and by the fairground rides and tinselly cocktail bars along Palace Pier.
He was more attracted, as a writer, to Brighton’s amoral underbelly — the racetracks and small-time hoods and working girls and dingy tea shops and the sense of lives lived close to the margins. A certain seediness clung, with the humidity, to everything.
Greene’s title refers not to a boulder but to a local specialty candy: a pink, mint-flavored sugar stick with the city’s name spelled through its thick white center. (Benjamin Moore sells a paint color called Brighton Rock Candy 1291.) In the story, the confection suggests the difficulty of escaping Brighton’s sucking grasp. A young woman says: “Look at me. I’ve never changed. It’s like those sticks of rock: Bite it all the way down, you’ll still read Brighton.”
Greene’s Brighton is recognizable in “Gunk,” Saba Sams’s stark and disaffected first novel. Sams, who was raised there, has given the city’s working-class neighborhoods, away from the gentrifying seaside, a potent Gen-Z update.
Her characters wear tracksuit bottoms and ratty gray hoodies. Their mattresses tend to be on the floor. Their neighborhoods smell like petrol fumes. They have sex in accessible toilet stalls because the rails are good for grasping. They drink Jägerbombs (shots of Jägermeister dropped into pints of Red Bull) and gnash their way through packets of crisps in bed. Even the beach water is scummy. They work tenuous jobs. One comments on “the pointless admin of being alive.”
The title refers to the name of a grotty bar, with sticky floors and port-a-loos out back. The title also refers, in a fond way, to the pasty white substance that can cling along with blood to a baby’s scalp just after its birth. These two meanings of “gunk” define this novel’s polarities.
“Gunk” has been a hit with readers and critics in Britain. Sams, who was born in 1996, was one of Granta magazine’s “Best of Young British Novelists” in 2023. That list is less of a king- and queen-maker than it was in the 1980s and ’90s, but it still sets reading agendas.
Sams’s first book, a wiry but sensitive collection of stories titled “Send Nudes” (it has yet to be published in the United States) put her on the map. The best story in it, “Blue 4eva,” about three girls on a beach holiday, won the BBC National Short Story Award. Profiled and photographed by British Vogue, Sams has become a marquee name on a freshly lit strip of English real estate.
She writes about social class, and about young women on the verge of stepping into either adolescence or adulthood. These women (girls, sometimes) are often sexually attracted to other women, when they’re not falling into bed with louts.
Sams’s fiction is quietly radical in that her young characters often have, or long to have, children of their own. (She has written about how she became a mother in her early 20s.) Among the questions her fiction asks is: Can punks be homebodies? Can they be hunker-downers?
The narrator of “Gunk” is Jules. She’s quiet, nearly friendless and (in her view) not quite pretty. She skipped college and fled her parents because they were well-meaning but suffocating. They “smell so strongly of fabric conditioner that being with them is like being inside a stock photo of a blue field.” Sams is a writer who pays attention to the world as filtered in by her character’s nostrils. Among the most common verbs in “Send Nudes” is “smelt,” as in “All the boys smelt of Lynx Africa and Subway.”
Jules goes to work in Gunk, the bar. She falls in love with and marries the owner, Leon, who continues to sleep with his student customers (he is “one fake ID away from a prison sentence”) and gives Jules chlamydia repeatedly. He is beautiful, though, in a swaggering, short-king kind of way. “He was like a dog or a baby,” Jules notes. “Being liked by him was chemical.”
Jules and Leon are unable to have a baby, and they divorce after four years. The novel’s arc tilts when an impoverished, hard-to-read 18-year-old woman named Nim begins working at the bar. (In a film, she’d be played by a young Kristen Stewart.) Jules and Nim commence a friendship that threatens to expand into something more. Each is like a cat meowing to be let out of a different cupboard. One will kick the other right in the ego.
Jules is an unreliable narrator. It takes the reader so long to understand this that, to use a technical phrase, it blows your mind to realize how you’ve subtly misread her. Stringing us along so deftly is part of Sams’s achievement. It’s also why I am loath to deliver any more in the way of plot summary. The book is heartbreaking (and coolly frightening) in ways one does not see coming.
What I will say is that Sams is alive at her typewriter. Here she is on her unlikely lothario: “Leon had a type that I could pick out from miles away: fleshy and overly sweet, like the cherries at the bottom of the bag.” A newborn baby has “his legs folded beneath him like a frog’s” and “irises thick as oil.” This writer consistently dispenses little gobs of feeling.
Maybe, like Verlaine and Rimbaud, this novel’s lovers will escape to London. Or maybe, as in Irvine Welsh’s “Trainspotting,” a neglected baby will end up gruesomely dead. These are some of the thoughts you entertain as you turn the pages.
I don’t want to oversell “Gunk.” It’s a young person’s book, and its range is limited. Yet limited mostly in a propulsive way: It’s got the unpolished urgency of a song by the Slits, or Bikini Kill. “God bless the feral poetries,” as Les Murray wrote. “Gunk” slowly ripens, on its B-side, into something close to tragedy.
In its twistiness and focus on blue-collar lives, it can resemble first novels such as Jeanette Winterson’s semi-autobiographical “Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit” (1985). It also reminds me, though their prose styles are dissimilar, of Margaret Drabble’s “The Millstone” (1965), which is also about unmarried pregnancy.
The indeterminate ending of “Gunk” put me in mind of lines from Greene’s novel: “I’ll tell you what life is. It’s gaol, it’s not knowing where to get some money. Worms and cataract, cancer. You’ll hear ’em shrieking from the upper windows — children being born.”
GUNK | By Saba Sams | Knopf | 224 pp. | $28
Dwight Garner has been a book critic for The Times since 2008, and before that was an editor at the Book Review for a decade.
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