This is not your average staccato millennial novel. Jules is not a hot mess, there are no ponderings on late-stage capitalism or the climate apocalypse. Instead, Gunk is a warm, often funny novel about an unconventional partnership.
Questions about desire, dual purposes and the ways in which we act out our love for each other seep through this book ... Saba Sams depicts a love growing between two women that is romantic, at times explosive, and evades a label – an exploration of a chosen family that sits in uncertainty.
At the heart of Gunk is a profound message about the insufficiency of the nuclear family, and a suggestion of possible alternatives. It’s a radical thought, one that Sams is well placed to articulate, and she does so with tenderness. I am certain that with room to experiment, if she leans into her instinct for the eccentric and the uncomfortable, there will be much more acclaim to come.
Surprisingly neat and risk-averse, which gives it the air of a slightly over-workshopped short story, compacted where it should feel expansive and with notably less bite than its author’s earlier edgy tales ... At its best, Sams’s prose is fresh as new paint, largely thanks to the striking simplicity of her descriptions ... Most interestingly, though, in exploring less commonly written-about intimacies and entanglements, Gunk pushes the popular motherhood narrative in a potentially fruitful new direction.
There are rough edges – long successions of sentences beginning with 'I', unvaried repetition of details such as Nim’s shaved head or the height difference between her and Leon – but they suit the narrator’s unfurnished inner life. She’s not speaking to impress but to witness ... Gunk is an elusive, idiosyncratic book that I would not want to have been written any differently. It deals in relationships that literary conventions were not built to hold.
Intimate ... Sams’s writing is assured and muscular ... And the novel subtly explores Julia’s motivations in caring for the baby and what a happy family might look like. This is striking.
