Living in her small flat and working as a dishwasher in a floundering restaurant, Frances is short on both specie and sanity, and the insatiable, incorrigible, inexorable Elaine only adds to her exasperation.ĭespite her general dislike of her girlfriend, Frances is forced to take things even further when her drug dealer, the amicable but businesslike Dom, calls in her debts. The crux of the matter is this: Frances, a self-deprecating young Londoner with a strong affection for alcohol and associated recreations, is entwined, quite literally, in a relationship with Elaine, whom she really doesn’t like all that much. The novel is something of a bait-and-switch (in more ways than one, as we realize later) in that the titular Elaine has but a supporting role to play. In her debut work, Sedating Elaine, Dawn Winter creates just such an antihero-rather, antiheroine-in a book at turns humorous, emotive, perplexing, and on balance, effective. But if fiction is to be an authentic-and, to some more than others, an entertaining-depiction of the world in which we live, then the antihero too is due his hour to strut and fret upon the modern novel’s commercialized stage. There is a rather odd aversion to the “unlikeable” character in the novel, as if fiction is to cloak itself in the sunny vestments of children’s television and portray the world only through the lens of those protagonists that pass some illusory morality test.
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