Fiction:'It would have turned out different if she'd eaten that cake," Tanya comments towards the end of Sandra Newman's second novel.
Cake By Sandra Newman Chatto & Windus, 257pp. £11.99.
But by then the reader is already versed enough in the sordid histories of the book's cast of damaged characters to suspect it's not just the recurrence of cake, with all its connotations of celebration and indulgence, that's to blame for its dark climax.
Until El tumbles over her doorstep, Tanya has been carefully constructing a life in London, with all the trappings of respectability - car, career, recently purchased house in Islington - as if to wall herself off from her brutal past. A violently dipsomaniac, drug-addicted US family has been replaced by a circle of artists, intellectuals and ex-pats comprising only men - men Tanya has slept with in a compulsion that, as the book opens, she is resolved to overcome. El trips into this tottering world on the arm of Mark, the "alpha, blah blah" male Tanya is trying not to have sex with. But El is different from the others that Tanya bounces between: staggeringly beautiful, alarmingly unhinged and, perhaps most significantly, female.
Once inside Tanya's home, El burrows deep, taking up residence in the life and heart of her host, who is instantly disarmed and even willingly complicit, as parasitic El takes over, covering the walls of her new house with drawings and upturning their lives in a chaos of sex, drugs, diamonds and death.
In dramatic terms, Cake has all the necessary ingredients: murder, incest, rape, prostitution, addiction, abuse - and on such excessive scale that it is a tribute to Newman that so much humanity is salvaged from the carnage. Her colourful curriculum vitae, which includes a stint as a professional blackjack player, and peripatetic past - the US-born writer has lived in Germany, Malaysia, England and Russia - has also provided her with ample fodder to explore the isolation and liberation that being a cultural outsider can bring.
The best of Newman lies not in her subject matter and the skilfully layered histories of her characters, but in her mastery of language and the pinpoint accuracy of its reaches. Tanya's voice is paramount: trailed-off sentences and broken paragraphs bring the reader right inside her head, forcing an identification that her un-Everyman experiences might otherwise have precluded. In the world of Cake, unconventionality is the norm, disallowing any easy absolutions and creating individuality from the characters' responses to events rather than allowing these events to entirely shape them.
The trips into their macabre pasts are at times sparse, then suddenly, convincingly detailed - such as the astronauts on Todd's sheets when Tanya first sleeps with him as a teenager, their pattern suddenly suffused with a desolate significance. Or a momentary focus as the big dramas play out around her and Tanya hones in on her drink of "vodka and orange - mostly orange".
Despite the novel's disturbing subject matter, Newman allows real moments of beauty: "The rain fell like clothes going on, it fit them." Somebody can produce a smile "like a cracked plate", and longing fills a face "like a bright colour". But Newman, whose first novel was The Only Good Thing Anyone Has Ever Done, doesn't shirk from the banality that runs through even the most extreme of circumstances. "Did you ever read Henry James?" Tanya asks the self-monickered Peter Rabbit in a moment of respite from high drama. "Yeah, sure I did. Oh, Henry James? No."
Such perfect pitch is what ensures Newman's voice will be heard above the din of the much-touted zeitgeist.
At times Cake shows a little too much underbelly, but it is her searingly honest treatment of so much bare skin that makes this book exceptional.
Fiona McCann is a freelance journalist.