Paul Fulcher's Reviews > I'm a Fan

Shortlisted for the 2023 Republic of Consciousness Prize, UK & Ireland
Longlisted for the 2023 Women's Prize for Fiction
Shortlisted for the Jhalak Prize
Foyles Book of the Year

For an algorithm not built by us, for a platform not designed for us to attract a cultural system which excludes us, do we commit further harm by performing our Otherness—by Othering ourselves for likes, for reshares and approval, to gain a following, to build a fanbase? What are the effects of this alienation, do we even care? Is the need for fervent fans a deeper expression of the fear of being anonymous because we know in an uproar there is protection. We do not want to disappear inside a nameless mass if Something Bad Were To Happen. If we remain part of the masses, we know we will suffer the double injustice of institutional neglect by the police or the justice system compounded by the original crime—like with our murder (Stephen Lawrence, Nicole Smallman and Bibaa Henry but also too many others) or a history-making miscarriage of justice (the Post Office scandal), the threat of deportation from the Home Office (the Windrush scandal) or stripped citizenship (Shamima Begum) for making a terrible mistake when you were a child.

I'm A Fan is the debut novel by Sheena Patel, part of the poetry collective 4 Brown Girls Who Write.

The novel is published by Rough Trade Books, associated with but independent of the famous Record label:

Rough Trade Books is a publishing house brought to you by the minds behind Rough Trade Records.

This new adventure in ‘capitalism’ is in the spirit of the pioneering independent record label, trading books and other wares of the same originality and radical direction.

And I'm A Fan is certainly original. It begins in a chapter headed "do i":

I stalk a woman on the internet who is sleeping with the same man as I am. Sometimes when I am too quick to look at her stories, I block her temporarily so she doesn’t know I absent-mindedly refresh her page fifteen times a minute while Netflix plays in the background on my laptop, my stomach flipping sick with delight when her profile picture is ringed red. She has tens of thousands of followers, is verified, and is the daughter of someone famous in America. An endless stream of white people fawn in the comments under her posts. She has opinions about household objects which I have never given a thought to before; firm taste in the types of beeswax candles to burn, lays exquisite cloth on her table in anticipation of dinner, knows where to buy limited edition pottery from well-regarded potters, she will happily spend $300 on a vase where she displays really, really organic fennel flowers, by which she says there is organic and then organic.

The female narrator, early 30s and a 'second-generation immigrant', is in a relationship of sorts with 'the man I want to be with', a married man with other lovers as well, one of which 'the woman I am obsessed with' she cyberstalks: I don't tell him how I've been monitoring her book release like I'm planning a drone strike.

The story proceeds in a series of short vignettes, not always chronologically. Her narration is often coruscating. On the 'the woman I am obsessed with', who carefully carates her priviliged white life on social media:

Aren’t these wealthy aesthetes on Instagram merely another iteration of a class elite deciding what is good and what is not good, shaping our reality the way they always have just better disguised by technology which has the optics of transparency and democracy? Are they not the beneficiaries of the old, covert systems, descendants of the children of settlers and the children of Empire, left-leaning spawn from right-leaning families, who can pick and choose objects plucked outside of their cultural context in some sort of static menagerie in order to show how innately open-minded they are even as their wealth has been drawn from global structures which decimate the cultures those objects are from?

Much of the novel also covers her relationship with 'the man I want to be with, transfixed by his indecision ... all these women waiting on his word, one which also models societal issues: When I pointlessly argue and fight with him, I feel like I am fighting the very structures of the old colonial forces, where he has, holds and takes, and I give, offer and ask for nothing in return.

And on her own desire for acceptance, as a writer, by the literary establishment, and why the literary establishment might welcome her as somehow validating their privilige - this perhaps the book's most striking passage:

The easiest route to build a following is to penetrate culture and the fastest way to do this is to tell them the story they want to hear—the one about our assimilation to whiteness or the abhorrence, or failure of this assimilation so white people with the keys to the castle can gasp and shake their heads and say, I never knew it was this bad, it‘s [insert year] for God‘s sake, and then will lower the drawbridge to let us in? We know succumbing to this will secure us the status we seek. It is how we can have a ‘name’, we can sit on the panels and talk about ‘diversity’, come up with earnest solutions inside historic buildings in front of a rapt echo-chambered public which will never amount to anything except feeling good about ourselves for how terrible we feel at the state of the world, it becomes the workshops we run, the books we write when we yell, we know what Britain really is and you don‘t, buy my book to find out the Truth. A fanbase is how we will get the advances, how we secure the invitations to prestigious awards, headline one of the smaller tents at the bigger literary festivals or one day maybe we will even get to cosplay at being a gatekeeper by becoming one of the judges of a well-regarded prize. We think explaining ourselves or justifying our existence isn’t too heavy a price to pay to gain entry through those gilded gates where liberal artsy white people will tokenise us as a symbol of their ideological progress—they can think they are so exotic for being into your work, aren‘t they so edgy, so underground or else most likely they will tip-toe around us, deferential but still exclusionary, it’s not such a high price for admittance to the cultural establishment, we reason.

From an interview with the author:

https://www.dazeddigital.com/life-cul...

Q: There’s a violence in the world that modern books – fiction and nonfiction alike – seem to engage with almost ambiently, but I’m A Fan confronts head-on. In terms of gender, novelists like Sally Rooney unpick desire and power through quiet waif characters who mostly turn that violence in on themselves ...

A: Sheena Patel: That ambient violence, that softly-softly, is absolutely the privilege of a white character in my humble opinion. The veneer of respectability and politeness disguises violence and the often shameful ways we are with one another. My narrator is on the sharp end of the world, she’s very angry, very dispossessed, an observer on the internet, a fan. Her voice felt slow and then, suddenly, it was as if I was alone with her and she drove everything, she’s bitter and clever and furious.

Two wonderful Guardian reviews:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/202...

https://www.theguardian.com/books/202...

Stunning. 4.5 stars rounded to 5.