Zoe Strachan: Spin Cycle

Posted on September 26, 2005 by Chris Mitchell

Zoë bloody Strachan. Three years younger than me and she's already published her second novel, both on Picador too. Zoë is Spike alumni, having written the semi-legendary Queerspotting and interviewed Alan Warner for us a few years ago.

Spin Cycle is one of those novels that makes me interested in reading novels again. Reading a book written by someone you know is always difficult not because you might dislike it but because you might be wholly indifferent to it. I find this with vast swathes of culture, books, music, film etc - that I simply have no opinion at all, that it completely washes over me and I feel completely disconnected from it. With books, this sense of indifference starts within the first paragraph. The tone of a book is the key - the edge of its prose. If it's leaden or affected, either way, I'm not reading any further. What draws me into a book is the lightness of its writing - Steve once said of Douglas Coupland that he was surprised at the "lack of pressure" behind the words, a phrase that's always stuck in my mind.

It's that lack of pressure I found in Spin Cycle. It's a three hundred page book I read in a couple of sittings, enveloped by the three main characters who work in a scummy Scottish launderette. Describing who the characters are here is irrelevant - and in a sense, it doesn't matter. Good writing can transform and speak through any character - what the occupation or age or sex or colour of a character is should not be the defining point of a novel. There is a steam engine of a plot that powers this novel, one that is revealed from different sides to feel like a cliffhanger but never abtruse, but the plot's not really the important part either. It's the three women in here, the deft recreation of their lives that never feels like a litany, that's the most satisfying part of Spin Cycle. Finding out more about their lives as the book unfolds feels dynamic, as their lives and outside events collide, and their psyches are laid bare to the reader. There is a lot of darkness and humour in Spin Cycle, generated by an unflinching honesty at work behind the words. It's the same feeling I get as when I read Gabriel Garcia Marquez, of a narrator laying out his characters in all their complexity and with all their, sometimes terrible, flaws, that a lesser talent would condemn or despise, but who manages to make them truly human, not cyphers.

Plus Spin Cycle has a laugh out loud moment about slithery lesbians.

I have no interest in judging novels by how well they followed a specific formula in creation of character and mastery of plot - those criteria mean nothing to me. Zoë's novel does all that stuff effortlessly, and she makes it look easy too. What interests me is the insights into ourselves that we find in novels, moments of self-recognition in characters utterly divorced from us, and a different way of seeing the world, albeit for the length of the book. Spin Cycle, in that sense, abducts the reader: it takes you into these other lives, exactly as a novel should but rarely does.

I'm not quite sure if this rambling half-review is going to help Zoë sell any more copies of Spin Cycle, but it really is a cracking novel. You should read it.