Jonathan Gibbs’s brilliant 2014 debut novel, Randall or The Painted Grape, plunged us into the gauche, shock-and-awe world of the Young British Artist movement. In place of Damien Hirst, Gibbs gave us Randall, the fictional doyen of the scene, a gifted wide boy awash with cash and acolytes. The familiar question – art or scam, or both? – was explored with originality and wit.
Beneath the cackle and the swagger, though, Randall was also a graceful, forgiving analysis of human relationships: how, through time and circumstance, they bend and warp and sometimes break and sometimes snap back.
Gibbs, his second novel confirms, is a Young Master himself. The Large Door is if anything even better than its predecessor. This time, the setting is academia, with Jenny Thursley, a troubled, fortysomething…
