Penelope Lively
Nothing is more baffling than other people's marriages. The trade-offs, the knowingness, the economics and the shared memory bank of lust, grief and joy: How do you quantify such a fearful epoxy? How can you ever fathom what lies beneath the shiny or snarly public surface? Those are the tasks that Penelope Lively has set herself in Family Album, her 16th novel.
Lively, now in her mid-70s, won the Booker (now the Man Booker) for Moon Tiger in 1987, beating out Iris Murdoch, Peter Ackroyd and Chinua Achebe. A solitary child of Empire, she was born in Cairo in 1933 of British parents. In 1942, her mother and her governess fled with her to what was then Palestine to wait out the hostilities of the Second World War. Her parents' marriage didn't survive the coming of peace; in the fallout, she was dispatched to a boarding school in Sussex, which she later described as "ghastly."
Despite her headmistress's horrified pronouncement that the school's graduates did not do anything as unseemly as attend university, Lively read modern history at Oxford. That's where she met her husband, Jack, the eventual father of her two children. He died in 1998 after four decades of marriage.
Perhaps Lively was fascinated by the overcrowded domestic upbringing she never had - at least two peripheral characters voice this longing. Whatever the spark, Family Album is an engaging and slippery novel, set in a suburban Edwardian pile. It bustles with family life, the nuanced barbs, the jostling for advantage and the closing of ranks when outsiders cross the threshold.
Besides Alison, the wannabe earth mother, whose children - disappointingly - have grown, fled (mostly) the family hearth and failed to produce progeny, there is her husband Charles, the freelance writer whose literary wares are no longer in demand, and Ingrid, the taciturn and watchful au pair, who arrived decades ago and, other than a single mysterious absence, never left to find a better job or a life of her own.
Then there are the disparate offspring: Paul, downtrodden by love and excuses, has followed a sketchy career of diminishing expectations; Gina, the difficult one, the achiever and the over-parented second child, roams the world's trouble spots as a television correspondent; Sandra, the beauty, a former fashionista, is a property developer in Italy; Katie, the kind gentle one, sadly infertile, lives in Boston with her husband; Roger, the clever chap, is a pediatrician in Toronto; and Clare, formerly anorexic, has created a new family in a modern dance company in Paris.
Equally significant as a character is Allersmead, the house "that has experienced around 43,000 days since it first rose from the mud of a late Victorian building site." The house, which Lively tells us, "has seen birth and death and a great deal of sex," is "the abiding presence that remains when all that evanescent human stuff has passed through and away." Bizarrely, I found Allersmead, the crumbling pile that had been "created as a shrine to family life," a lot more compelling than many of the human characters, most of whom existed merely as stock types in a sitcom.
As the author, Lively seems more like a documentary film director grasping a wobbly hand-held camera than the accomplished writer of more than a dozen novels. Scenes are set - the novel begins with a tour of Allersmead - perspectives and tenses shift as each character is handed the microphone to bear witness by speaking directly to the viewer - er, reader. Plenty of predictable secrets are revealed: who pushed Gina into the pond at her eighth-birthday party; what really happened in the games in the cellar - the one place Alison never goes - where Paul and Gina become pseudo-parents to their younger siblings; who grabbed the sharp kitchen scissors, stole into Charles's study and cut his manuscript to shreds? What is it about Clare that is so odd? These revelations, which are easily guessed, lack emotional resonance and don't contribute to a larger statement about domestic life. Consequently, the novel has a brittle tone.
Slowly we creep deeper into the labyrinth and the monster that sleeps at the heart of the Harper family, and indeed, of most families, at least from the perspective of the children: What is the story of our parents? How did they meet, what made them stay together, do they love us? And here, Lively is at her most chilling. Alison, who disdains birth control, is guilty of the unforgivable maternal sin of openly favouring one child above all others.
Here is an exchange between a grown-up Paul, the loved child, and Gina, the overlooked one. Neither has become a parent.
She once told me I was her favourite. She shouldn't have done that, should she? True or not. That wasn't good mother stuff. Good mothers don't have favourites, or at least they don't say so. Was it true?
Yes, says Gina.
(Pause) Did everyone know?
Yes (Pause). Did you mind?
Me? Not specially. I thought it a rather perverse choice, I remember.
You could imagine Alison's grown children exacting their revenge, but it is Charles, the emotionally absent typist in the ground-floor study, who wields the stiletto, appropriately enough after a party celebrating their 25th wedding anniversary. True to form, Alison has concocted an elaborately staged family dinner, at which the hapless and drunken Paul smashes her precious Limoges dessert plates. Later, as a teary Alison and an aloof Charles are getting ready for bed, she turns to him and asks: "Why did we get married?"
A brief silence.
"I seem to recall you were pregnant."
What matters to Alison is the semblance of family life - the picture ops presented by birthday cakes, holidays by the sea, babies clutched to her breast - rather than building an intellectual and emotional relationship with her husband or putting in the often tedious hours listening and talking as children stumble toward independence. Lively is deftly ironic in her depiction of an aging Alison, giving vastly popular cooking classes in the kitchen of Allersmead, while her dreams of imparting motherhood lessons have to be shelved because nobody is interested.
In the end, I mourned Allersmead's predictable fate rather than Alison's. She is too shallow to resonate as either a victim or a villain, which left me feeling dissatisfied with Family Album as a novel, and yet curious about Lively's own memories of family life and the baggage she, herself, may be ready to abandon.
Sandra Martin is a senior feature writer for The Globe and Mail. Her most recent book is The First Man In My Life: Daughters Write About Their Fathers.