From the Academy

The Academy is a great store of knowledge and opinion about great books. From time to time we ask its members to write a short piece on books they have admired. Here are some of their responses, most recently about 2015 Folio Prize winner Akhil Sharma’s Family Life, and further back about the one book they would have liked to win the Prize if it had always existed.

Matt Thorne on Sergio De La Pava

untitledI read a lot for review. But I have a friend who works a nightshift and is an even more voracious reader and every time I saw him he told me I had to read this new novel, A Naked Singularity by Sergio De La Pava. He told me the writer had struggled to find a publisher, but that he hadn’t read anything like it in years. My friend likes big, expansive, experimental books. Infinite Jest. William T. Vollmann. Harry Crews. Cult novels, I guess, by outsize writers. So I diligently ordered A Naked Singularity and realised he was right. It’s a systems novel, of a sort, but far more accessible than Gaddis or Gass. Pava is conversant in popular culture, but uses it to more original ends than most—I love the characters who start to see the protagonists of The Honeymooners as real people. Pava has a social conscience and a reporter’s eye. And the depictions of night court are as thrilling as anything you’ll find in any crime novel, without the restrictions of the genre. It’s a masterpiece, and I’m delighted it’s finding popular attention. This is the sort of novel you always want to see on prize lists but is rarely there.