The novel of the summer that's already splitting critics

It is rare for a debut novel to be both the most praised and the most attacked book of a season, but Aurélie Sandt has managed it in under two months. The Inventory of Small Drownings arrived in May trailing the kind of advance notices publishers dream about — comparisons to the great modernists, a sleeve crowded with superlatives — and for a few weeks the consensus held. Then it cracked, loudly, and the cracking has become more interesting than the praise. To read the reviews now is to watch a literary culture argue with itself about what it actually wants from fiction.

The novel itself is a strange and formally restless thing. It has no plot in the usual sense. Across roughly three hundred pages, a narrator who may or may not be Sandt catalogues the moments in a life when she nearly went under — a childhood swimming accident, a marriage, a mother's slow illness — but refuses to narrate any of them straight. Each "drowning" is rendered as a list, an inventory: objects, weather, overheard sentences, the temperature of a room. The effect is hypnotic when it works and airless when it doesn't, and reasonable readers disagree, violently, about how often it works.

Autofiction, again — but is it?

The first front in the war is the oldest one in contemporary letters: autofiction versus invention. Sandt's defenders read the book as a brilliant interrogation of memory, a refusal of the tidy redemptive arc that the publishing industry has made compulsory. Her detractors read the same pages as a familiar move — the author's own life, lightly fictionalised, dressed in difficulty to disguise how little is actually made up. "We have spent fifteen years calling confession 'courage,'" one prominent critic wrote, in the review that turned the tide. "At some point we must ask whether the emperor has simply run out of clothes to take off."

That is unfair to Sandt, who is plainly doing something more deliberate than confession. But the charge lands because it names a real exhaustion. A generation of acclaimed European fiction has mined the self, and readers who once found that bracing are beginning to find it claustrophobic. Sandt has become the lightning rod not because her book is the most self-regarding of the lot — it isn't — but because it is the best, and the best example is always the one the backlash chooses.

The second front is about form against feeling, and here the lines are messier. The inventory device — the lists, the refusal of scene — is either the book's radical achievement or its fatal coldness, depending on who you ask. I find myself on the warmer side: the accumulation does something a conventional scene cannot, building grief out of grocery receipts and bus timetables until the absence at the centre becomes unbearable precisely because it is never described. But I understand the readers who feel kept out. Sandt has built a wall and called it a window, and whether you see through it may depend on how much patience you brought.

What the fight is really about

Strip away the personalities and the quarrel is about a genuine fork in the road. One path says the novel's job is to make you feel — to deliver character, story, the warm machinery of empathy. The other says its job is to make you notice — to estrange the familiar, to refuse the consolations of plot. Sandt has written firmly down the second path, and the ferocity of the response measures how many readers and critics still want the first, and resent being told they are behind the times for wanting it.

That is why the book matters beyond its own merits. The Inventory of Small Drownings has become the place where a tired argument finally got specific, with a single text everyone has actually read. My own verdict is that it is a flawed, frequently astonishing debut by a writer of obvious and slightly frightening gifts — a book worth the fight it has started. Read it before you decide whose side you are on. You may, as I did, end up uncomfortably on both. For more of the season's reading, see our list of ten reads for a summer that counts.