It seems a little uncharitable towards a book in which the professedly at-least-semi-autobiographical narrator uses writing, and is using this writing specifically, as a kind of coping mechanism for PTSD, alcoholism and the pain of divorce, to criticise the book for being overwhelmed by self-pity. But it is. My word, it is. I suspect there is a category of reader for whom Unspeakable Home might come across as raw and authentic and tortured and other such trendy adjectives. The best adjective I could come up with for it, unfortunately, is mopey.

And it’s a shame because the opening tone of the novel, while very clearly focusing on the narrator’s trauma, strikes a tone of emotional and authorial bravado that lifts a reader’s optimism: ‘Fuck narrative coherence, what about the dude is broken don’t we understand?’ Yeah! Here’s a book that’s promising to do something interesting in the name of exploring brokenness. This is a punk-lit proclamation to get the juices flowing for a novel in which the best bits are focused on the TZ Punx, a band of teens growing up in Tuzla during the Bosnian civil war, of whom our narrator is one until his emigration to the US at 18.

Perhaps part of the problem is the insistence on being interesting. The novel is structured in non-linear, semi-autonomous chunks, all placed within a fun but somewhat strained epistolary frame whereby each episode is prefaced by a letter to Bill Burr, the comedian whose comedy specials and podcasts are helping the narrator get through post-divorce life. This sounds interesting, sure, but given that Prcic throws out the aim of narrative coherence, and indeed the reader is given far too much to do to try and construct a coherent whole out of the chunks, what’s left lives and dies on the capacity of each chunk to sustain its own interest and move the reader on through the novel. Sadly, for me at least, it died. The episodes are fine, not great. And there’s a lot of them. And there is so, so much mopey insistence on the brokenness and trauma without enough wit or narrative interest or descriptive brilliance to make us really care about anything or anyone in the book.

The consolation, I suppose, is that Prcic told me what was going to happen so I really should have seen it coming. Speaking about literature from the perspective of both writer and reader, the narrator declares in a section entitled ‘Obligatory Warning’: ‘Both sides lose, always: one misunderstands, while the other is misunderstood. Now that we all know what losers we are, let us at least try.’ I tried. I lost. Oh well.