The Lonely Witness by William Boyle

 

This is a skinny little novel, but it's impressively dense, and remarkably relaxed about its pacing; things take some page-time to happen, more than you might think given there aren't much more than 250 pages. The prose scintillates, but the narrative threads seem to pull in an awful lot of directions at once, the POV character does a lot but spends most of the novel something less than entirely clear why she's doing it, mostly not even thinking about any actual intended aim. None of the people in this novel are exactly exemplars of superb mental health, probably because they're in what still exists of New York's underbelly, in places where gentrification can't even imagine going, and they're doing what they can to get by, and what they can do isn't always a lot, it's rarely more than barely enough. There are a lot of background characters in the novel that kinda run together, but that's reasonably explained as just having so little in common with the POV character or the people she prefers to hang around with. It eventually gets to a place that's worth the slim going, and it wasn't an unpleasant journey, it just felt a little rudderless through parts of the middle.