For a novel whose word count barely exceeds 800 (yes, I counted), Dear Kenneth provides plenty of fodder for contemplation and speculation.

A few pages in, readers of Cole Degenstein’s brilliant third novel would be forgiven for thinking they’d found something in the lineage of Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet. Two men – one a poet, the other a visual artist, both of them in Japan although not Japanese – are in long-distance correspondence after an unspecified time at close quarters. The trouble is that the correspondence has gone fallow: Kenneth, the older poet, hasn’t been writing back to Cole, the younger artist, and Cole, to put it mildly, isn’t happy about it. “I’ve not been well, if I’m honest,” he writes. “I could say ‘I’m doing better these days,’ but it wouldn’t actually mean anything.” 

You could cut the passive-aggressiveness with a knife, and things don’t get any cheerier. For much of its duration Dear Kenneth reads, on one level at least, like a case study in depression and loneliness. Cole’s missives grow more despairing by the page: “No one knows how to be anywhere anymore. Everyone talks at the movies and stands in the middle of the sidewalk. Everyone is the only person in the world.” But is Cole simply performing his anomie as a means of instilling guilt in his negligent correspondent? Has he been projecting onto Kenneth all along? Were the two men ever actually connected in any significant way? Conversely, might this be the aftermath of a love affair gone wrong? Adventurous reading clubs would do well to choose Dear Kenneth. The debates could go on for hours.

With a book so light on text it can be tempting, as a reader, to speed through it, but ideally you’ll stop and linger over every page, giving the images and words the time and mental space to work their complementary alchemy. The images themselves are rendered in graphite and coloured pencil, and simple descriptions are unlikely to set the pulse racing: potted plants looking distinctly neglected; a small building in Kyoto with a cracked facade and a frayed awning; row upon row of what look like non-prescription medicines arranged on a shop shelf. Somehow Degenstein invests it all with the spirit of poetry.mRb