Exhibition by Alex Hyde review – an elegiac love letter to the YBA era

For all the wrong reasons, Damien Hirst’s Shark (The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living) has a claim to being the most prescient British artwork of the last half-century: a grim parable of neoliberalism. In 1991, it was still possible to mistake the predatory violence of that system for a kind of animal vitality. But today, open-mouthed, dead-eyed and decayed, it speaks only of a regime preserved far beyond its natural lifespan, lauded exclusively by institutions that can profit from its ugliness.

Alex Hyde’s second novel, an elegant Künstlerroman which plays out during a lightly fictionalised version of the YBA explosion, explores the resonance of that particular cultural inflection point: a moment when the collapse of the postwar cultural settlement, municipal culture and public institutions was transfigured decisively and ubiquitously into individualised, confessional artistic capital.

It tells the story of Rabble Stone, a working-class photography student who moves to London and falls into the orbit of a moneyed, cosmopolitan artistic set who are alternately impressed, baffled and alienated by the seriousness of both her manner and her work. Among them is the unnamed artist, now deceased, to whom the novel is primarily addressed through a series of elegiac reminiscences, unpicking their entanglement as friends, muses and occasional antagonists.

double quotation mark

Questions of self-authorship and plagiarism are handled well enough, but will feel overfamiliar to many readers

Central to this relationship are the ways in which their respective selfhoods become intertwined and distorted via their ongoing artistic collaboration. Rabble begins to photograph the artist, a series of intimate, confrontational portraits that are eventually physically incorporated into the artist’s figurative drawings and paintings. Hyde’s descriptions of the work strongly evoke Tracey Emin, as does its subsequent journey from localised art-world curio to highly valuable, globally exhibited market commodity.

Thematically, there is an air of predictability in how this all plays out. Questions of self-authorship, doubling, co-option, plagiarism and the quasi-erotics of display and representation are handled well enough, but will feel overfamiliar to many readers. There are also occasions where the language is imprecise and hesitant in ways that appear to be stylistic lapses rather than stylistic choices. Hyde leans heavily on superposition; needs are “base and noble at the same time”, faces are “ugly and beautiful at the same time”, characters feel “something and nothing at the same time”. And just as frequently, the prose lapses into a hazy self-correction that reads less as an evocation of the unreliability of memory and more as syntactic hesitance.

The novel also contains passages of precise and inventive writing. Hyde is especially admirable on a rhythmic level, demonstrating comfort with the staccato and fragmentary as well as the more languid and expansive descriptive work she uses sparingly but to great effect. She writes particularly well and tenderly about bodily exhaustion, both among the working-class communities of Rabble’s youth, and the struggling artists she later encounters in New York, both made brittle by virtue of their position in the economic value chain. Similarly, the character of Duncan, an effervescent aesthete who succumbs to the ravages of addiction, is handled with delicacy, a lightness of touch that captures the horror of chasing ghosts until you finally become one.

Also commendable is Hyde’s willingness to grapple with the issue that plagues ekphrastic writing in practically all of its forms. To write about images is to render things that are fundamentally spatial, relational and simultaneous into sentences that are necessarily sequential, disaggregated and hierarchical. The standard way out of this dilemma for a novelist is to focus the description such that it tells us less about the artwork than about the sensibilities and feelings of the character viewing it. In Exhibition, however, Hyde repeatedly goes a step further and engages directly with the theoretical challenge at hand, allowing Rabble to talk at length about composition, the role of the lens, the function of framing; how photographs “are not taken … they are made”.

And that Rabble is a photographer, rather than, say, a sculptor or a painter, hints at what appears to me to be the novel’s central philosophical concern; namely remembrance, nostalgia and preservation. It is photographs we turn to, after all, to re-narrativise our lives, to reflect on distances travelled and the alternate turns we might have taken along the way. That feeling of melancholic reflection, of abundant futures concertinaed into the inevitability of the present, suffuses Exhibition and is its primary achievement. For just as Rabble is left mourning lost friends and collaborators, we as readers are left mourning the loss of something larger and more significant, an entire structure of possibility. Exhibition is a eulogy for a world of livable rents, radical art schools, free higher education and opportunities for working-class artists, for a society in which a life like Rabble’s, spent making beautiful things out of the people and places she loved, was not seen as a risible pipe dream or as the gate-kept preserve of the select few.

Keiran Goddard’s latest novel is I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning (Abacus). Exhibition by Alex Hyde is published by Granta (£14.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com