Clarke 'Body Builders' Review: A Striking Debut
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- Albertine Clarke, 26, publishes her debut novel "The Body Builders," described as 'radically strange and engrossing' and 'written with great clarity and imaginative resourcefulness.'
- Ada, the narrator, drifts through London swimming in her apartment basement pool until episodes of dissociation, ontological insecurity, and auditory and visual hallucinations — including a radio voice announcing her parents' divorce — escalate into a full breakdown.
- The title refers to Ada's father, an IT technician whom her mother throws out after he becomes obsessed with the gym; the novel uses this to explore how people construct themselves and others.
- Ada's romantic entanglements include an older American writer named Atticus, whom she believes is sharing her memories, and a younger admirer named Patrick whose love she cannot reciprocate; she ultimately must choose between the two.
- A Naxos holiday with Ada's estranged mother serves as the book's 'most striking section,' where she snips a mole from her shoulder believing it to be a surveillance device and her extreme behavior escalates into a 'predictable breakdown.'
- In a hallucinatory care facility with 'excellent room service and a pool,' Ada meets a mysterious Polish man named Darrius who confesses he isn't real — a phantasm she later admits she 'made and demolished with the sadism of a child.'
- The reviewer frames the novel as a literary equivalent of Polanski's Repulsion meets Michel Gondry's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, echoing The Bell Jar and Deborah Levy's Hot Milk, and calls it 'a forceful performance from a promising new talent.'
Why it matters: Clarke arrives as a debut novelist at 26 with a formally ambitious psychological novel that the reviewer positions within a prestigious literary lineage — Plath, Levy, Polanski, Gondry — making the book a notable entry in the crowded 'sad girl lit' subgenre and a talent-watching marker for editors and critics tracking new British fiction.
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