Introducing our 10 best debut novelists of 2021
HIGHWAY BLUE
BY AILSA MCFARLANE
A young couple goes on the run in this retro road novel.
Anne Marie was only 19 when she married Cal, an electric, slippery man who “was good at talking” and left her without warning a year after their wedding. When he reappears again more than two years later asking for help paying off a debt, she can’t help him. But her life becomes entangled with his once more when they find themselves in a violent altercation with a man attempting to collect on Cal’s debt and accidentally kill him. Anne Marie and Cal are forced to flee the town of San Padua and hitchhike down the coast. On their journey, they rely on the help of an eclectic group of strangers and reopen the wounds of their unresolved relationship. McFarlane, at 23, is not much older than her protagonist, and she is an undeniably talented writer: Though her prose is often affectless, her descriptive passages can be striking. “In San Padua you can never get the ocean out of your brain”; on the road, Anne Marie and Cal see “dead armadillos in the ditches and sometimes at night flashing white rumps of deer.” But it's hard not to feel that McFarlane’s talent might have been better served by taking more time to incubate. The novel suffers from the anxiety of influence: McFarlane's very serious young characters feel not like members of Gen Z but instead transplants from the 20th-century American novels by which she has clearly been inspired. And though she refers to solar power and cellphones, she bypasses practical realities of life in the 21st century, including politics and social media, rendering this novel curiously inert.
A limited first effort from an author to watch.
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