An Irresponsible Age
Lavinia Greenlaw Fourth Estate, 328pp, £16.99
ISBN 0007156294
Tolstoy said that all happy families are alike, and where a certain type of clever, untidy, upper-middle-class British family is concerned, he was right on the money. In this kind of family, which often considers itself startlingly unique, the inevitable carefree childhood has a sell-by date - if left to carry on too long, it curdles. Unless the adult siblings can move away from their spooky games and the rituals that have calcified over the years, they will find themselves in a cul-de-sac of bewilderment, wondering why the old certainties are no longer certain.
In her second novel, Lavinia Greenlaw swoops down upon just such a family to chart its disintegration and rebirth. The year is 1990, "the end of a pugnacious decade and the tail end of a particularly long century". The Clough siblings have grown up amidst the tasteful decay of a crumbling country house. Two of them now live in a similarly crumbling housing-association property in London. Fred (the eternal baby of the family) works in the City, but has no idea what to do with the money he makes. Juliet works in a trendy gallery. Carlo is a doctor who cuts up dead bodies. Clara is trying to paint while she raises small children. Tobias is a failed architect, and is working as a despatch rider to support his wife and child.
It is the sudden death of Tobias that triggers the crisis. The Clough parents, never more than shadowy figures, fail to rise to the challenge of healing the breach. Grief sends them into retreat, almost as if they had died, too. The remaining siblings are left treading water, trying to make some sense of their fractured identity. "How would you feel," demands Juliet, "if your brother was killed and your parents decided that instead of helping you to get through Christmas, they would bugger off?"
Juliet is the main focus of the novel. At the time of her brother's death, her life is defined by physical pain: a mysterious, immobilising pain that she can never get properly acknowledged, let alone diagnosed. In the saddest scene of the book, she asks her doctor father for help, and he gently begs her to ignore the pain and not to worry her mother. Juliet is about to start a teaching job in America, but has in the meantime fallen in love with a man called Jacob Dart, whom she first hears through the wall of her office making nasty phone calls to his estranged wife. Before she lays eyes on him, she knows that any woman would be a fool to trust him, and she duly flings herself at him like a lemming. Jacob's interest is piqued by Juliet's flight to the US, and he follows her. They live together in a charming little house in the woods, and are very happy as long as they don't consider the future. None of the Cloughs likes looking ahead. In the aftershock of their brother's death, they are all running like mad to stay in the same place.
The point of it all appears to be that refusing to break away from the family identity cripples your emotions and messes up your life. In London, babyish Fred is having a peculiar relationship with a rather barking Sloane named Caroline. Carlo, who is gay, is plunged into a terrible state of confusion when he actually meets the man of his dreams. And Clara, after a dodgy brush with troublesome Jacob while painting his portrait, is forced to re-evaluate her tired marriage.
None of it is surprising, but you can always tell a good cook by her skill with standard ingredients. Greenlaw is a writer of wonderful elegance and detachment. She treats her reader as an invisible observer, simply flinging you into the midst of the family with the minimum of explanation. She is uncannily aware of the freakishness of adult siblings when they revert to pack behaviour. This is a novel about the difficulty of growing out of a happy childhood, and eventually having to be blasted out of it with dynamite.
Above all, An Irresponsible Age is terrifically funny; how could it be otherwise? This is Festen with the edges softened, transferred to the Home Counties. "Well we've burnt half the furniture and plundered the heirlooms," says Fred, after the disintegration of the family home. "Who wants cheese on toast?"
Kate Saunders's most recent novel is Bachelor Boys (Arrow)
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