The Promise by Damon Galgut review – legacies of apartheid theguardian.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from theguardian.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Take Chip Lambert, the struggling writer in Jonathan Franzen’s novel
The Corrections. Having lost his teaching job at a liberal arts college after a wild weekend of sex and drugs with a student, Chip moves to New York, acquires a leather wardrobe, pierces his ears, and gets to work on a revenge screenplay. Endlessly “grooming the corpse of a dramatically dead monologue,” even Chip knows the screenplay is a dog but he nonetheless manages to convince himself that it’s his ticket to fame and fortune. Fortune, first and foremost, because Chip is so deeply in debt that he is reduced to stealing a salmon filet from a ridiculously overpriced downtown market by stuffing it down the front of his pants: “Chip put his hand to his crotch. The dangling filet felt like a cool, loaded diaper.”