I'M A FAN

A London woman is consumed with a married artist and his numerous lovers.

The unnamed narrator of Patel’s debut novel is in a love triangle of sorts. There is the character called only “the man I want to be with,” who is married but has a number of women on the side, including “the woman I am obsessed with.” The narrator and this woman have never met; the narrator hears about her secondhand from the man, and she spends hours screenshotting and mulling over the woman’s carefully curated Instagram feed. This woman and the narrator are both side pieces—“What we should have done is unionise,” says the narrator about the artist’s “harem”—but the narrator has a boyfriend, too, whom she admittedly treats abysmally. (Perhaps this is more a love spiderweb than a love triangle?) Blisteringly self-aware, the narrator knows she is trapped in a cycle of desiring the things she hates the most: wealth, influence, fans, prestige, expensive objects. (There is plenty that comes in for unequivocal skewering, however: neoliberals, white women influencers, Trump supporters.) Threading through every action and emotion is the narrator’s sense of her own relationship as a person of color to the white artist and his white paramours. Of the artist she writes, “It takes me a long time to realise that when the man I want to be with tells me he likes being seen with me in public what he means is, he enjoys what my skin colour says about him to other people.” Patel is a member of the 4 BROWN GIRLS WHO WRITE poetry collective, and there are echoes of poetic structure here, as in the way the very short chapters are each titled, like prose poems—and each driven by a mix of narrative and bellows of rage.

Chaotic and cathartic.