Toni Sala's THE BOYS

This novel is a good introduction to the Catalan writer, so the glowing blurbs assure me. "A masterpiece," praises one reviewer. I don't know if I would call the novel that but it is certainly very engaging. Two brothers, both young men, from a small town died in a car accident. Four narrators describe their reactions to the tragedy and carry what plot there is forward. First up is a banker who works in the town but lives outside of it. He is therefore the most detached of the four narrators, seeing in the deaths a question for his own satisfactory but rather mundane life. Next is a trucker who resents mightily the older generation for taking the fat of the land and leaving nothing for the young like him. To fill his empty life, he turns to prostitutes, and then finds himself falling in love with the fiancee of one of the dead men. The third part is narrated from the perspective of the fiancee, who tries to deny the reality of what happened. An artist concludes the book with an explanation of the demonic trajectory of his art-making, a trajectory that finally led to the road accident. The four parts are not all equal. I find the trucker and the artist most absorbing, the first for his visceral, even brutal, response to life, the other, well, because I'm always interested in artists' biographies. The banker said some interesting philosophical things but he went on for too long. The fiancee was rather one-dimensional, a flaw in the writing that would disqualify it from being considered a masterpiece, I would have thought. Sala's vision is as pessimistic as that of Michel Houellebecq, whom he reminds me of, but Houellebecq is more cynical and ironic, whereas Sala is most philosophical and lyrical.