Beautiful Mutants and Swallowing Geography: Two Early Novels

These early works from Levy (Swimming Home) are populated with an assortment of rootless misfits, many eastern European in origin. In Beautiful Mutants, the orphaned Lapinski is sent by her Russian grandmother to England in search of a better life. But there she finds only menial work and people similarly at odds with the world. One gets by as a prostitute to support her young children, another works on an assembly line, while a third hangs out at the zoo, communing with the animals. Only Gemma, "The Banker," has brief success. Scenes are unpleasant but indelible—a pet bird lies perfumed and dead in a box under a bed, a man relishes having sex to a recording of machine-gun fire, and zoo animals burn up in a catastrophic blaze. Swallowing Geography stitches together a pastiche of similarly disturbing scenes featuring the nomadic JK; Lillian, her once elegant mother; and her friend Greg, who is dying of AIDS. Most of the other characters, identified only by initials, mix it up with well-known 20th-century personalities such as Trotsky, Lenin, and Franco.