Bolt from the Blue

by Jeremy Cooper

In 'Bolt from The Blue', Jeremy Cooper, the winner of the 2018 Fitzcarraldo Editions Novel Prize, charts the relationship between a mother and daughter over the course of thirty-odd years. In October 1985, Lynn moves down to London to enroll at Saint Martin's School of Art, leaving her mother behind in a suburb of Birmingham. Their relationship is complicated, and their only form of contact is through the letters, postcards and emails they send each other periodically, while Lynn slowly makes her mark on the London art scene. A novel in epistolary form, Bolt from The Blue captures the waxing and waning of the mother-daugher relationship over time, achieving a rare depth of feeling with a deceptively simple literary form.

Genres: Fiction, British Literature, Contemporary

280 pages, Paperback

First published January 27, 2021

About the author

Jeremy Cooper is a writer and art historian, author of six previous novels and several works of non-fiction, including the standard work on nineteenth century furniture, studies of young British artists in the 1990s, and, in 2019, the British Museum's catalogue of artists' postcards. Early on he appeared in the first twenty-four of BBC's Antiques Roadshow and, in 2018, won
the first Fitzcarraldo Editions Novel Prize for Ash before Oak.

Reviews

[Adina ( back from Vacay…slowly recovering) · Rating 3 out of 5]

Edited review. I went for full 3stars after log deliberation.

Bolt From The Blue is the latest release from Fitzcarraldo edition and my first miss with their books. The novel is a collection of letters/e-mails/postcards between a mother and her artist daughter. The communication lasts with some hiccups for 33 years, until the death of the mother. From the beginning we are told by the narrator that it is a story about the relationship between a mother and a daughter but we have to read between the lines for it, we need to work to put the story together.

The part that I liked about Bolt from the Blue was exactly this reading between the lines, struggling to understand why Mum said something and got the answer she got an so on. It made me think about the relationship I have with my mum although it is totally different than the one in the novel. I appreciate the way Cooper, a man, succeeded to present the relationship between the two main characters, two women. For this reason I awarded 3 stars, he made me care and think.

And now let’s get to the bad parts (for me). Lynn, the daughter, goes to art school in London and subsequently becomes a film artist. In her correspondence she bores her mother (and the reader) to death with a lot of insignificant details about the modern art world (mostly film). There is a lot of name dropping and not once did I have the curiosity to Google an artist. I think it is a feat in itself to talk about art so clinically and without any heart. I admit I started to skip most of the art talk which left me with less than half a novel to read. Oh, I almost forgot about the painfully detailed descriptions of each postcard. I know Copper is a collector but why torture the reader with his unshared passion? I am currently reading A musical Offering by Luis Sagasti and I feel the opposite. I am constantly interrupting my read to research the books and music he mentions and I listened to most of the songs the author names. I did it because the author made me curious even though classic music is not my thing.

I have more. Vlad first pointed out the lack of evolvement of the characters and I have to agree with him after paying more attention to the subject. The characters correspond with each other for 33 years but they seem to keep the same style of writing, their thoughts and taste remain mainly unchanged. It makes them feel unrealistic and they lack credibility.

The idea and structure was interesting but the execution was less than it could have been. I warmed up to the story in the end but it could have been so much better.

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 2 out of 5]

Sadly alongside my narrow-minded account of art things, this correspondence mostly tells of our family difficulties.

Jeremy Cooper’s Bolt from the Blue is, in the novel’s fictional world - or perhaps that should be “claims to be” - a record assembled by (fictional) film-maker and artist Lynn Gallacher of her correspondence with her mother, as she explains in the introduction:

To keep things straightforward and, as far possible, honest, I have precisely transcribed all the postcards and letters, later emails, I could find between my mother and me from my moving down to London in October 1985 until her death in August 2018 … My letters and postcards and emails were always dated, hers never …

One thing that surprises me is the overlapping language, the shared phrases, related tone ...

My thoughts at least are not my mothers.
I don’t think they are.

I was left with an immediate feeling from the introduction that Lynn doth protest too much, and an oddity arises as soon as the second letter, apparently sent on 7 October 1985, just after Lynn started at St Martin’s College of Art. She describes - the books she is reading, concluding rather over-specifically Finishing off with the Good Terrorist, just out in paperback.

Alerted by Neil’s review (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...) to later inconsistencies (other books appparently read years before they were published) a moment’s Wikipedia search (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goo...) turned up (my emphasis):

The Good Terrorist was first published in September 1985 in hardcover by Jonathan Cape in the United Kingdom, and by Alfred A. Knopf in the United States. The first paperback edition was published in the United Kingdom in September 1986 by Grafton.

So Lynn has either transcribed the date of the letter wrong (either accidentally or deliberately), or she made a slip in her original letter - except the very specific mention of the ‘just out in paperback’ rather rules that out - or Cooper made a mistake - but that seems unlikely (see later).

Lynn herself becomes part of the modern art scene, specialising in film. And rather large parts of the letters consist of details of fellow artists from the Young British Arts scene, and their works, a scene with which Jeremy Cooper himself had links (https://bombmagazine.org/articles/uno...). More googling suggests these are almost all real-life people, even those with whom the ficticious Lynn has close relationships, and actual works of art. Indeed in a blog - link below - Cooper explains:

The world inhabited by Lynn Gallagher is personally familiar to me, her progress as a young artist in London from the mid 1980s till the death of her mother in 2018 is informed by my friendship with artists of her generation, several of whom are named as themselves in the novel.

In contrast I must admit to having little knowledge of, or interest in, that scene - despite being a very similar age to Lynn, Damian Hirst and Gilbert & George were the only names I recognised.

Many of the letters are also written on artist postcards, which again mirror Cooper’s own interests and extensive collection - see here https://blog.fitzcarraldoeditions.com... - but add little to the plot.

It isn’t that Cooper - or his avatar Lynn - are unaware of the rather insular nature of much of the material. She apologies on more than one occasion that her letters to her mother are largely insider art-gossip .. of utter unconcern to the world at large, and for dolling out contemporary art and film lectures. But that the writer knows what they are doing doesn’t alter the rather tedious (for me) reading experience. One of the mis-dated books mentioned is Sara Baume's Line Made by Walking - and she writes about similar modern art in a way that draws the reader in and makes them seek it out, which wasn't the effect this book had on me.

There is an underlying, potentially very interesting story, about a clearly troubled mother-daughter relationship (involving a rogue absent father), but it isn’t so much between the lines (as Lynn suggests in her introduction) as buried under the detail, and I couldn’t help feel Gwendoline Riley’s forthcoming My Phantoms does this a lot better.

Lynn also spends a lot of the letters in “tub-thumping” (her words) naive student politics (mine), bemoaning the influence of money in the art world and the reality of the world in general. Again Lynn's mother pushes back on the naivety of her views although the author's postcard collection might suggest he's more on Lynn's side.

As to the odd timing inconsistencies - well I remained unsure what is going on but became increasingly sure they were deliberate.

Notably, Lynn notes her affinity with (real-life) film maker Ben Rivers, going to far as to say:

He really is man me! Every film I've seen of his could have been made by me. Same for him with my work.

And later on, when Lynn befriends Rivers, one of the mis-dated pieces of work is his film, made with Anocha Suwichakornpong, “Krabi, 2562” (https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020...)

And the novel reproduces (or invents?) an information sheet from the BFI accompanying the screening of the movie (one that in the novel happens in 2017 even though the film was released in real-life in 2019), which includes in its description (again my emphasis):

enjoyable time shifts in the second half, viewers almost believing the missing woman has disappeared … with a crucial, unexplained date contradiction in [the caretaker’s] to-camera statement in the film, spreading a sense of unease about the fate of the girl.

Other clues - well Lynn’s first exhibition, the anagramatically self-titled Lalage N R Lynch, is a fictional documentary of the mysterious disappearance of a school-girl artist (“although Lalage has, to all intents and purposes disappeared into thin-air … there is no suggestion she might be dead”). It's a story Lynn and her mother, begrudgingly and accusingly respectively, both describe as having autobiographical routes. There is also an odd preoccupation with Stephanie Slater, who was kidnapped by Michael Sams (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael...).

But I couldn’t make this cohere into an consistent explanation of what was going on. Although perhaps that’s not the point and even Cooper himself doesn’t know; I well remember Gabriel Josipovici, when I asked him if he knew the real story of his wonderful and enigmatic The Cemetery in Barnes, replying to me “if I knew what had happened, I wouldn’t have needed to write the book.”

So there may be something very clever going on - although again it felt this aspect of the novel was buried under the “insider art-gossip.” the “contemporary art and film lectures” and the “tub-thumping.” And I also seem in a small minority of readers seeing the inconsistencies as anything other than artistic licence, so I may well be imagining a more clever novel than this really is.

This feels like a potentially 4-5 star read for the seemingly subversive sub-text but 1-2 stars for the surface trappings. I will settle for 2.5 stars, until I see any indication that I'm not just imagining the subversive elements.

[Emmeline · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m glad I read this as soon as it arrived from my Fitzcarraldo subscription, before realizing how much it is about modern art could turn me off this collection of letters and emails between a mother and her daughter.

There’s a lot of art talk here. Lynn, the daughter, is a contemporary of Damian Hirst, Susan Hiller et. al. and after leaving her mother and her Birmingham suburb eventually becomes a successful video artist. Her letters and postcards to her mother over the next thirty years are littered with art gossip and musings; her mother’s often make passing reference to working down the pub, evade answering questions about Lynn’s father, and take issue with all these “art lectures.” Like I imagine most general readers, I was on team Mum here, but I did like how Lynn’s letters brought the times and the community to dazzling life.

Lynn and her mother don’t see each other in person for over ten years, eventually do reconnect, and through it all mainly communicate in print. Lynn, in the book’s preface, collects and orders these years of correspondence and wonders “Where in these letters is there evidence of maternal ill-treatment, [causing me to] physically cut myself away from whatever it was in her that I felt the need to protect myself from? I am obliged to answer, Nowhere.”

It’s possible there’s something very clever about art going on here, but I chose to ignore it. For me this was an electrifying read as a mother-daughter relationship, watching two women spectacularly miss the point (the ‘intellectual’ woman rather more, it must be said) for decades. Like life, there are moments of epiphany, usually followed, as in life, my moments of complete triviality. Like life, the correspondence just stops. It made me think about what is left of a relationship, once foundational, when the participants seldom see each other and it is finally boiled down to a series of passive-aggressive or misinterpreted texts. Living in a different country from all of my family, I took this rather personally.

I love Fitzcarraldo Editions, but sometimes the books seem more about cleverness and intellectual playfulness than about emotional connection. Rightly or wrongly, this one affected me on a gut level. When I finished, I called my mother.

[Hux · Rating 3 out of 5]

A novel in the form of letters/postcards written between a mother and daughter across several decades starting in 1985 and ending in 2018. Cooper does a good job of offering small snippets of their lives until, by coalescing effect, it builds into a larger picture whereby you can sense the general volume of their lives, their relationships, their work, their gradual ageing and experience. In that sense, the small entries are effective as little pieces that add to the picture but it also means a lot of them are slightly redundant, easily dismissed, and the urge to skim read becomes increasingly tempting. I think I zoomed through this whole thing rather quickly in the end. 

As for the two protagonists, I can't say that I actually liked either of them to be honest but I especially found Lynne, the daughter, to be slightly insufferable. Not in any bad way, simply that she represents the banal middle-class rather beautifully and exhibits all the traits required for such a performative life (the book did remind me a little of Latronico's Perfection in this regard). She begins as an art student and over the years garners a certain amount of success as an artist possessing all the mundane political outlooks and opinions which such a person might. She marries an older man, Richard, doesn't want children, and fundamentally maintains a character which I found a tad cliched. Her mother is a little less overbearing, prone to keep at least one foot in the real world, but occasionally they write barbed letters to one another in a manner that strongly hints at anger, resentment, and an open dislike of one another. I guess this was Cooper's attempt at realism, making sure it never becomes too bland. 

For the most part, it's effective and overall I would say I enjoyed the book but found it mostly inoffensive and ultimately a little forgettable. There's something very light-weight about it, the story being trivial and bland, a snapshot of normality but one which is a little tedious, and it should be noted that the format is one which, I would imagine, was very easily manufactured given that it requires no plot, not great writing, and no particular effort. Plus, it's not exactly realistic, is it? People writing letters in 2014 etc. Cooper even comments on this in the form of an opening blurb by the daughter Lynne where she acknowledges it (rather conveniently) by reiterating:

These letters are letters, not literature.

Well sure, in the fictional setting that's true but it's still a novel, Jeremy, still a piece of art created by an author. And, as such, you would hope there'd be a little more to it, a greater substance. But there isn't. So the book is very easy to read and did a reasonable job of (briefly) fleshing out two fictional creations into something more but was, when all is said and done, ultimately a rather gentle offering. I enjoyed Brian a lot more than this but I am still very much a fan of Cooper's writing. 

[Matthew Ted · Rating 2 out of 5]

137th book of 2023.

Letter writing, now a mostly dead artform (or rather, metamorphosed, artform, now as email-writing), is an intimate thing. I've had numerous pen-pals over the years, and still hold several. A number have been from here on Goodreads. Some have blossomed into true friendships, others as steady companions. But as much email writing as I do, I've never been a fan of reading epistolary novels. They never reach depth for me. Cooper's novel here is no exception. It tracks a mother-daughter relationship over decades. The daughter gets into the British art scene around Kapoor, Hirst, Emin and co., the mother works in a pub. Though some letters were touching, on the whole I was just reading through them with complete apathy. I don't understand how people can connect with something like this, it's as if you're reading an entire novel secondhand, or, as they used to call it at university, at arm's length.

[Neil · Rating 2 out of 5]

With apologies to the 5 people who have already hit the "Like" button, this review has been edited since first posted after a brief online discussion with Paul (see his review for even more thoughts and details).

“Bolt from the Blue” explores, in epistolary format, the relationship between a daughter and her mother. The book begins:

”To keep things straightforward and, as far as possible, honest, I have precisely transcribed all the postcards and letters, later emails, I could find between my mother and me from my moving down to London in October 1985 until her death in August 2018”

And the real question this book raises is how true this quote actually is.

The daughter is Lynn Gallagher. Lynn’s explanatory note at the start of the novel goes onto to explain that there are gaps in the story but ”patterns coalesce, sometimes by chance, at other times by design”. As Adam Scovell points out on the back cover of the book, this style is designed to leave the reader with work to do. The exchange of communications between mother and daughter is the partial story of almost 33 years, but there is an underlying story which is the relationship between the two women. It is up to us as readers to put that underlying story together.

Lynn’s move to London in 1985 is to attend Saint Martin’s School of Art and, from there, she gradually becomes more and more involved in the London art scene eventually making quite a name for herself. This was a significant period in the UK’s art scene and we get an insider’s view into the rise of the Young British Artists (YBA) movement, presumably based on Cooper’s own experience. As the book sets out it feels (much like David Mitchell in his recent Utopia Avenue) that Cooper has decided to name drop every possible artist that he can think of and the book is replete with cameos by people whose work you can Google if you feel so inclined, and by reference to specific exhibitions. I have to say that it is impressive how Cooper has inserted the fictional Lynn Gallagher into real life. Alongside these artists and exhibitions, there are copious references to real historical events. I am mentioning this thorough grounding in the “real world” for a specific reason that will become apparent in a moment. Suffice to say here that all these cameos and references had the same effect on me here as they did in Utopia Avenue: there are too many of them and I didn’t like it!

Another key part of the novel is descriptions of the postcards that Lynn and her mother exchange for some of their communications. Some are made by Lynn but many of them are by real-life artists and designers and you can find them on the Internet. I suspect you would also have found them in the exhibition that Cooper organised at The British Museum of postcards created by contemporary artists. (UPDATE: A blog post on the Fitzcarraldo website written by Cooper about the postcards indicates that all are real but he has, for the purposes of this book, made Lynn Gallagher the creator of some of them - it is unclear whether the artists concerned know their work has been appropriated by a fictional artist).

And here is where I start to struggle with the book. Firstly, let me say that I am keen to engage with others as they read this book because I can’t help thinking I have missed several key things. I will be very happy to return to this review and re-work it when some things have been explained to me. The first thing is why all these postcards are described in detail, apart from the fact that the author has a collection of postcards.

The second thing I struggled with about the book is illustrated by one of the cards. In an entry for January 2016 there is a description of an anti-Trump postcard designed by Jonathan Horowitz. You can look this postcard up on the internet very easily. Only what you will discover is that it was created in 2017, a year later than this book references it. For a book that has been so specific about dates of exhibitions and news events etc., it seems strange to suddenly be out by a year. The trouble is that this is just one of a multitude of such anomalies. There are so many that it has to be deliberate. (UPDATE: The Trump card one is definitely deliberate and the blog post referred to above makes that explicitly clear). And, if it is deliberate, how true is the opening quote of the book cited above? As another example, in May 2014, Lynn recommends some books to her mother including The River Capture (published 2019) and then, a few pages later still in 2014, Mothering Sunday (published 2016) and A Line Made By Walking (2017). Later on, in a 2017 entry, there is a long description of the film “Krabi, 2562” released in 2019 (incidentally, this is a Ben Rivers movie, one of two people to whom the book is dedicated). These are just a few examples out of a much larger collection.

There does seem to be something going on in the background here. There is definitely a requirement on the reader to put together their own understanding of the daughter/mother relationship. But there must be something else related to all the inconsistent dates. It's probably very clever, but the plethora of insider art references/name-dropping rather hid all that because it's hard to see through it all. When someone explains it all to me, I may be able to add another star, although perhaps not because the book itself feels like it was written for a crowd that I don't belong to.

[Robert · Rating 4 out of 5]

After reading and thoroughly enjoying Jeremy Cooper’s Brian , I had to check out his previous novels with Fitzcarraldo so I picked up Bolt from Blue. One thing about going through an author’s novels is that themes start to emerge. In a way Bolt shares some similarities with Brian, albeit there’s a different dressing.

Bolt from the Blue is an epistolary novel: An art student, Lynn Gallagher, documents a series of postcards and letters she has sent to her mother during her first year at art college in the mid 80’s all the way to 2018. At times the narrator breaks the fourth wall be describing the postcards she sends to her mother.

What we get is a mother and daughter relationship, but an odd one. A daughter who is enamoured by this new art world she is going into and later integrates into her adult life. As the narrator grows older she ventures into film as well. We have a mother who doesn’t fully understand what her daughter is doing and yet is supportive and still has her motherly instincts.

We also see a development of the British art scene from the mid 80’s to the Young British Artist movement of the 90’s with Hirst and Emin etc, with Gallagher making her mark as well. As Jeremy Cooper is an art critic one can feel his love for the art and film scenes.

The end result is a deep relationship between two different people. There is love and respect in equal measures and although this is a novel about art, the mother/daughter dynamic dominates and there is emotional resonance. Thus even if art is not a strong point, Bolt from the Blue can be appreciated by anyone.

[Justin Evans · Rating 2 out of 5]

Cooper's first Fitzcarraldo book was a lovely diary of someone's time at a farm. This one is epistolary. There are a few ways to avoid writing linear prose, and Cooper is starting to run out of them.

As others more qualified than me have noted, this is pretty mediocre stuff. I'm not sure how much you would have to care about the Young British Artists (me: less than 0) to enjoy this book; I'm very upset about this, because 'Ash before Oak' got me through some depressing weeks. This produced a depressing week. There's minimal development, there's not much worth saying about the aesthetics stuff, the relationship between mother and daughter isn't particularly interesting. If you're really, super into the whole 'it's the notes he's not playing' style of literature, you might enjoy this. Those of us who have to work for money, or have to work to keep children alive, or even have to work to get grades, may not want to also work on explaining the holes in the plot cunningly left vacant (/lazily left unthoughtthrough) by the author.

[Alex O'Connor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Any new Jeremy Cooper is a treat, though this one perhaps a touch less than others

[Jason RB · Rating 3 out of 5]

First up this is probably closer to a 4 than a 3.

Really enjoyed the book and the ups and downs of the mother daughter relationship. The idea of using postcards was inspired.

However it is a book probably more enjoyable to someone who knows and cares about the London art scene, who gets the in jokes and lightly veiled references.

Despite that I would recommend this book as the actual story is highly enjoyable

[Tosh · Rating 4 out of 5]

The "fictional" letters between the daughter and the mom are very moving. I suspect anyone can relate to the dialogue or lack of dialogue between parent and child. Jeremy Cooper, I think at the moment, is my favorite author.

Here are more of my thoughts on Cooper.

https://open.substack.com/pub/tosh/p/...

[Stuart · Rating 4 out of 5]

I very much enjoyed this book. This was my first Fitzcarraldo Edition and I have seven more in this year's subscription. The lengthy descriptions of the postcards and some other parts I found I skimmed and many other descriptive seemingly unimportant details. I am sure they are meaningful but it is "above my pay grade." I do think the character development worked... mainly that the character’s personalities remained fairly consistent throughout their lives. Somewhat annoyingly so! We may not like some people's personalities (particularly those that seem overly narcissistic or self-serving). But looking more deeply at their style of communication, one may see the positives and the dysfunctions in full display. Also, I give much credit to the author... it kept surprising me that the author was male and he so deftly wrote a very believable communication between mother and daughter.

[Chloe Jones · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5. Tender and human, but didn’t evoke extraordinary feeling. Loved the art chat and the subtle slagging off of Damien Hirst (sorry Damien).

[Barry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Glued to this all day. Set in the London art scene, it reminded me of Eliza Clarke's 'Boy Parts' and Alex Allison's 'The Art of the Body', but this is set as exchange of letters between the artist and her mother.

[Suki Ferguson · Rating 4 out of 5]

We start in 1985 London. Eighteen-year-old Lynn Gallagher leaves her single mum and her Birmingham suburb behind, as she sets out to become an artist. Lynn writes postcards to her mum, or Mother as she asks to be called, from her prestigious art college. With some prodding (‘Have you got the correct address?… I’m not going to write into thin air’) Lynn receives sporadic replies. But Mother has little to say to her only child: ‘I’ve settled in. To my new hours at The Blind Traveller. And to controlling the booze.’

Meanwhile, Lynn’s letters glow with her determination to succeed in the art world. She writes with an obsessive enthusiasm about the London scene – its favoured techniques, its people, its galleries. Yet the more she rhapsodies about avant garde exhibitions, and accumulates artistic triumphs of her own, the more her mum clams up. Or lashes out, with the sharp criticism only a mother dares to provide: ‘What do I think of your… what would you call it? A picture? Don’t think much of it, to be honest. Looks a bit of a mess.’

Through clueless missives and acid replies, a picture emerges of a pained mother-daughter dynamic that is comic for being familiar. We see a repeatedly fractured, repeatedly mended relationship, just barely held together by their mutual compulsion to correspond, and to understand. Along the way, we follow an ambitious artist’s heady arc through the London scene of the 90s, 00s, and the 10s. We also discover the tics and tendencies that these two women, increasingly divided by money and class, have in common...

I reviewed Bolt From The Blue after receiving a copy from the publisher. Read the full review over at the Mechanics' Institute Review: http://mironline.org/reviewboltfromth...

[Kay Wyma · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a sweet gift from one of my daughters (her sister is at the University of Arts London), hich of course I read. And enjoyed, even marking a few things I wanted to remember about comparison & creatives. I enjoyed the postcard theme; but it sometimes felt tedious.

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

An epistolatory novel of postcards and email exchanged between an artist named Lynn Gallagher and her mother. Beginning in late 1985 with Lynn’s emancipation from a small, blue-collar town (where her mother works at one of the local pubs) to art school in London, and ending in 2018, with the death of Lynn’s mother.
In the beginning, neither woman neglects to give the other an acid bath of words with almost every exchange. The relationship is fraught with resentment and reluctant love and respect for the other. The mother is poor enough to rely on Christmas season tips to even out the spottier times of year, while Lynn goes from one success to another, doing well enough to have a house in London and a secret two-story studio that sounds like a re-purposed warehouse.

As Lynn’s mother complains to her, Lynn comes across in her correspondence as self-absorbed with her work and her recognition of merit by critics, fellow artists, and collectors. Perhaps that’s Lynn’s way of compensating for the ways in which she feels emotionally diminished by her mother. Mother and daughter don’t meet again until seventeen years after Lynn’s departure, on Lynn’s insistence. Her mother is hurt by the snub—and thus the cycle of resentment continues. As the decades go by, however, the recriminations dwindle between the two and they become more like friendly confidantes.

Cooper’s evocation of the mother / daughter relationship sounds convincing to me, a son raised by two parents. In comparison to Cooper’s Ash before Oak—which won the first Fitzcarraldo Editions Novel Prize and is similarly formed as Bolt, but rather than letters uses diary entries—Bolt lacks Ash’s raw, emotional, and visceral descriptions of a person emerging from a profound depression, which sound more like roman à clef than do the imagined disputes of a mother and daughter, realistically described as their relationship is.

Cooper should also be lauded for the verisimilitude of the exchanges by the addition of ragged edges of this narration: Those gaps between correspondence in which questions go unanswered, events and persons go unexplained, and so forth—just as one might expect from a fragmentary epistolary record—but whose lacuna seem natural, unforced, and leave no questions of significance unanswered. And of course, what seems supremely ironic to the parent, is the (now older) child’s confession to the parent: Forget what I said earlier. We really are alike, you and me.

For more of my reviews, please see https://www.thebookbeat.com/backroom/...

[Ellie Cooper · Rating 4 out of 5]

What did I appreciate? Epistolary form is always a handy way for the writer to lend themselves into the world of the characters, I truly felt like I was invested and intrigued by their lives.
The use of letters allows Cooper to build the world between the Gallagher women. Certain name drops that come up years later with deaths, new moments etc creates a relationship with the reader as they remember the name much like mother or daughter do.

Cooper plays on the natural curiosity of a reader- we begin to truly try and dig through the language and tone to figure out the relationship between the two of them.

We come to accept and connect with characters over the course of a novel which is beautifully reflected as Lynn and her mother do, reflecting this experience of maturity, acceptance and patience which is an important moment in mother daughter relationships.

Not appreciate? I felt Lynn’s character to be a bit of a drag, her constant name dropping of artists and exhibitions etc etc became a reason for me to skim read or skip through as I just couldn’t be bothered to learn about things. Perhaps this reflects the mother’s own feelings about her daughter’s interests and allows us to connect more with the mother though? Lynn’s character is well rounded and defined but I’m unsure as to whether Cooper wanted Lynn to be kind of annoying.

I think there is a frustration with epistolary form sometimes that can make the reader feel left out. I don’t want to keep up with dates, times, and I certainly don’t care for what postcard is used- which Lynn loves to indulge in. There’s this stop start feel to the plot that can feel sort of boring and really made me just want to quit reading at some points. I think the confusion between postcards, letters, emails and gaps for phone calls could be a bit overwhelming to keep up with. Not necessarily an important gripe but definitely something that was in the back of my mind when reading, which I really didn’t want it to be.

Probs add more later :)

[Juliano · Rating 2 out of 5]

“Subjects changed with time, as did the relationship, the basic structure of our connection hardly at all.” Jeremy Cooper’s epistolary novel, Bolt from the Blue, spans thirty-three years and tells the story of a mother-daughter relationship. Starting in 1985, with Lynn moving to London to go to art school, leaving her mother in Birmingham, the novel explores the distance between them, how so much time passes with both of them too stubborn to visit the other. Much of this gulf between them relates to their respective upbringings, to Lynn’s father who left them when Lynn was a baby + her mother’s father who died too young, and the ways that these experiences dwindled life and made Lynn supposedly harder to deal with from a parental perspective. And, in Lynn’s mother’s defence, in Lynn’s letters there is a singularity of focus, a tendency towards being an art bore. I’ll say upfront that I enjoyed some of Cooper’s ideas, and how he expresses the friction that arises when people struggle to express themselves and to understand others. But, unfortunately, it was most useful for reminding me that I don’t enjoy everything I read; as Lynn’s mother feels like such a prop, even in most of her own scant letters, Lynn’s pretentiousness borders on the unbearable. And granted I’m not a fan of epistolary fiction, the form felt very flat in this narrative. But worst of all, I think, were the inconsistencies arising in narrative and characterisation, and the avoidable anachronisms (such as the 2014 letter recommending books not written until 2016 and 2017) that were ultimately very distracting.

[Laura Pritchard · Rating 3 out of 5]

There is a very interesting and clever book in here, but sadly it is buried under pretentious art-world prattle and name-dropping, and so it’s… well, kinda boring. Unless you’re into the specific happenings of the London art scene from the 90s onwards, it might leave you cold - that’s all the main character can talk about. She’s insufferable.

Peel that layer back though, and there is good stuff below: the strained mother-daughter relationship is dealt with very cleverly, with subtext and a lot of reading between the lines. We never get the full picture as so much is withheld between the characters and from the the reader.

So, although the arty-farty stuff was a bit of a slog, I can imagine that if you swapped that for alt-music of the 90s and early 00s, I might have completely loved it (though then it may have felt too close to home…) I guess we all like to nerd out about something 😆

[Joel Gladstone · Rating 2 out of 5]

Disappointing. I so enjoyed “Brian” and “ Ash Before Oak” which uses similar approaches of verisimilitude and incorporating content related to artists, postcards, and film. This one fails for. Couple of reasons. The main character, the daughter, her correspondence is used to carry too much narrative weight, in an unnatural style for so called letters to her mother and it leans so heavily into her preoccupation with her interest in art to a degree that is didactic and not credible within the context. The character is presented as a kick ass artist with deep integrity and focus. That is belied by the style. Either that or she is a bore and and a boor, with no sign of personal change or development with her mother.

[Edward Champion · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was incredibly fond of Jeremy Cooper's other novel, BRIAN, which was a gentle and subtly touching novel about one man's inner cinematic life, completely unknown to the rest of the world. But Cooper doesn't quite have the magic doing the same thing with this epistolary novel over the course of many years between a mother and daughter. It starts off well enough, but, unlike BRIAN, quickly becomes tedious when you start to realize that you're not going to get a lot of interpersonal details revealed here. Which is a shame. Because Cooper showed great talent with BRIAN at exploring the liminal spaces within life. I'll still give his other novels a try, since I really did enjoy BRIAN so much. You're honestly better off reading that.

[Jonathan yates · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't understand the criticism of this book, which in this books case seem to be often very long-winded, this book is simply a fictional story that talks about art in the way the writer wants to talk about art through the lens of a familial relationship which is clearly fictional and also is how this writer chooses to express his art story through, so wild take, this might not be the same way you talk about art because you aren't this writer. he also might have his own opinions/ideas about art and life because you aren't this writer, to all those reviewers please write your own book, if you want to enter a pretty interesting persons mind go ahead and read this book
thanks

[sisterimapoet · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wasn't sure what to expect from this as it seems to have polarised reviewers – but I liked it a lot. It helps that I have an interest in the particular art scene at the centre of the novel, but I also liked the voyeuristic way the epistolary form allowed us to eavesdrop on the relationship between mother and daughter. I liked seeing the way they negotiated understandings and misunderstandings – the way they got to know each other and themselves in the process.

[Stevie Bell · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 ⭐️. I enjoy an epistolary novel and as a former art student liked the art history references throughout, especially the parts on the YBA’s. Most of the grudge held by the characters was formed prior to the novel and what remained unsaid between letters was telling. It was an interesting reminder that two people will have two very different takes on their relationship, despite both trying their best. Evocative stuff.

[Mew · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really like the epistolary form of this book and the way that we followed a story through the letters between a mother and daughter. The bits that weren't shown were as important as what was and it left the reader to fill in the gaps.

I personally enjoyed the detailed YBA bits but I think it would be a little tedious to someone who had no interest in modern or contemporary art. I'm not sure why you would be drawn to this book in the first place if that was the case!

[Kania · Rating 5 out of 5]

𝐈𝐧𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐠𝐫𝐚𝐦: 𝑝𝑖𝑢𝑝𝑖𝑢𝑝𝑖𝑢𝑏𝑜𝑜𝑘𝑠
✰᪥𝐂𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐚𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐭𝐢𝐜 𝐣𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐧𝐚𝐥 𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐬 𝐚𝐥𝐨𝐧𝐠 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐦𝐲 𝐛𝐨𝐨𝐤 𝐫𝐞𝐯𝐢𝐞𝐰𝐬♪✩
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A mother and daughter's relationship never simple, it waxes and wanes over time, it is just like a roller-coaster. Cooper wonderfully tells the tale with wit, humour, and he also envelops some historical points throughout the postcards Lynn and her mother exchanged.

[Rafael Tornel · Rating 2 out of 5]

Quería ponerle tres estrellas pero he visto que esa puntuación la tiene La Clase de Griego y El Parisino. Este libro pues se merece las dos.

La historia se vende bien y la forma de estar narrada me ha gustado (a través de cartas), pero no he conectado nada con los personajes ni con la historia de fondo que hay en el libro.

La verdad que un poco plof porque me esperaba más.

[Bridget Bonaparte · Rating 4 out of 5]

Taken as a whole, a touching account of a fraught mother-daughter relationship emerges. Superb use of gaps, silences, erasures etc. Does an excellent job of showing how we rarely know who we are & how things endure, despite it all. More like a 4.5

[Cerys Minty · Rating 3 out of 5]

Enjoyed the hyper specific chronicling of the contemporary art world, and london’s cultural scene, but found some of the mother/daughter interactions unrealistic and melodramatic, and didn’t take much of a message from it