Scarlett Thomas

Thomas—whose website, www.bookgirl.org, features a ticker displaying the running cost of the war in Iraq—offers a broader political take in Going Out. “The [book’s] central message is that you can be trapped and not know about it,” she says. What’s normal for you isn’t normal; it’s just what you’re doing. In the book, Julie expresses her fear of trains. In the U.K. we have had a lot of bad train crashes recently, but you’re still seen as weird if you don’t want to go on one. But actually, the train companies, like most private corporations, do cost assessments and work out whether it’s cheaper to install that piece of safety equipment or to pay out insurance when a few people die.”

For all its 19th-century forerunner’s influence, Going Out is rooted firmly in a 21st-century post-industrial landscape. “The pop culture stuff is like a nervous tic I’m trying to learn how to control,” Thomas jokes. She appears to have found a partial cure. Thomas conceived of her debut, Bright Young Things, as a “time-capsule novel” and packed it with of-the-moment items. When writing Going Out, however, she says, “I made a decision that I would make less obvious references—to build up a sense of a culture saturated with crap without necessarily naming the crap.”

With characters who wield emotional impact in an artificial setting, the novel recalls the so-called “Kmart fiction” produced by Raymond Carver and his peers in the 1980s. From a long list of influences that includes Art Spiegelman’s graphic novels and Marge Piercy’s utopian Woman on the Edge of Time, Thomas singles out Carver’s seminal story “Feathers.”

Thomas’s latest novel, PopCo, about a puzzle maker at an experimental toy company, was published in Britain in 2004. Harcourt will publish it Stateside in 2005, along with her next book, currently a work in progress. With this kind of trans-Atlantic exchange, it won’t be long before emerging American writers begin fashioning their work after that of Scarlett Thomas. She’s proven she knows how to offer such compliments with style; presumably she can accept one graciously as well.