High and hard to climb

High and hard to climb

Gabriel Tallent’s debut, My Absolute Darling (TLS, September 8, 2017), a novel of prepping, nature writing and father-daughter incest, quickly ascended the bestseller lists. It featured excellent prose, outbreaks of careful lyricism and a knack for the intense, dense portrayal of everything from a single personality to the whole Mendocino coast – a technique that sometimes oppressed the reader as effectively as the book’s problematic set-up oppr…