“A human being, in the absence of making heavier demands on life, confines himself to the simple task of wanting to understand himself.” Derek Owusu takes this quote from Kierkegaard as the epigraph to his new novel, Borderline Fiction. It’s an apt choice: the book is introspective and complex, an attempt to wrestle life into some kind of sense.
We meet Marcus, the narrator, first at 19: unstable, self-destructive, but immediately likeable, tough and vulnerable at once. Then again at 25: older, a little more self-aware, somewhat subdued, but still caught in the same loops. This back-and-forth creates a portrait that’s effective, and often claustrophobic, of destructive patterns repeating and morphing across time.
At its core, the book is a love story, tracing the blossoming and collapse of Marcus’s first relationship. Around this axis spins a carousel of other entanglements: hookups and situationships of varying intensity. Owusu is sharp on the microdynamics of sex, homing in on the resonant details: in one scene Marcus fakes an orgasm just to escape a joyless encounter.
Love, though, is only the eyelet. Through it, the rest of Marcus’s chaotic life comes into view: his drunk, sermonising Ghanaian father, rendered with chilling precision; an early drug-induced psychosis and later dependence on pills and cocaine; compulsive gym routines; fraught dealings with money.
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The novel isn’t flawless. The older sections can flag, the structure drifts and the prose, though frequently brilliant, is uneven. But these shortcomings matter less than the sheer ambition of Owusu’s project. Time and again, he catches hold of something elusive, the inchoate truth of an emotional experience, and in those flashes the book rises to something almost spiritual:
“I was sleeping and I must have woken up looking at her closed eyes above me like say she was going to fall into my body, and I swear it felt like that, like our lips finally found a way through for a moment, like we finally broke the rules and touched.”
Owusu’s real gift lies in letting desolation pierce tenderness. The novel is not just a love story but something sadder and more complicated: an examination of how relationships can stand in for a sense of home when the world feels hostile.
