Gunk
By Saba Sams
Alfred A. Knopf
In Gunk, a lonely bar manager forms a fraught bond with an enigmatic teenage runaway who entangles her in a messy web of desire and uncertain kinship.
If you like a slow burn, this book is for you. Though Gunk’s plot is scandalous, author Saba Sams doesn’t jerk readers from one shocking plot point to the next. Tension patiently builds up as Sams brings us deeply into the protagonist and narrator Jules’ dubious inner world. Jules’ questionable choices ignite the action in the novel, and Sams forces readers to live out each unsettling consequence with her.
To immerse readers fully into Jules’ psyche, Sams takes her time describing scenes and Jules’ wry observations of the people, places and things that shape her reality. Sams writes with the visceral flourish of a poet who draws whole worlds with precision.
Take Jules’ first impression of the character Nim: “She had a strange, unlikely beauty; the kind of beauty that grew on you, that crept up and slapped you around the face.” Jules’ analysis of Nim not only gives us a sense of her physicality, but also of her formidable spirit which is on display throughout the novel.
Nim is an 18-year-old runaway who insists she’s not a runaway. She refuses to talk about her family, and her mysterious air pulls Jules in. Jules is Nim’s boss at a bar in Brighton, England, called Gunk. Much of the novel orbits around this place. Gunk’s name alone suggests its grimy goings-on. Sams’ painstaking details bring readers into the grubby club and forces us to sit in its stink.
From the start, Jules and Nim’s relationship is odd as there is an unspoken attraction between them. Jules feels that Nim stirs up an energy within her. But somehow Nim ends up sleeping with Jules’ ex-husband. Oh, and she gets pregnant. Then one day she disappears. Awkward …
Gunk tangles up the concept of found family. The underlying driver of Jules’ motivations seems to be her internalized rejection of her true desire for love; she doesn’t think she deserves more than the barest minimum of what life has given her. She’s not in a relationship and doesn’t seem to have friends. She has rejected her parents for reasons that seem unreasonable. They didn’t cause her harm; their love for her just made her feel claustrophobic. She wants a love that she can control, even going as far as to say she would prefer being a single mother. She takes the “family” she can get, no matter how harmful they may be for her.
At the beginning of the novel, we learn that Jules wants to get pregnant by almost any means necessary; she avoids adoption and IVF. She’s even willing to create a family out of her destructive relationship with a philandering husband, Leon, who gives her crumbs to survive on. She believes he is a narcissist, yet she remains closely in his life even after they split up.
But at least it’s her decision to make, right?
Nim completes the picture of Jules’ found family, yet Jules battles feelings of attraction and guardianship towards her. Should she even trust Nim considering the circumstances? Readers may find themselves frustrated, screaming at the characters, figure it out already! The friction that mounts up between them adds pressure to the plot, however – as does Jules’ bizarre choice to raise her ex-husband’s love child.
There seems to be a restlessness and maybe recklessness lying quietly in Jules’ spirit. As you read the novel, you’ll question whether she is truly steering her life or letting things simply happen to her.
Jules is a tough character to decipher, both for readers and the people in her world. Through inhabiting the unstable world of Gunk’s unreliable narrator, you will question every perception, wondering where Jules’ self-protection ends and the truth begins.
