The Telling by Miranda Seymour

The Telling by Miranda Seymour is the life story, life confessions perhaps, of Nancy Parker. She is living out her retirement in a satisfactory way, given that she has been one of life’s downtrodden. 

She has been victimised, abused, betrayed and even framed, a recipient of repeated short straws through no fault of her own. And Nancy Porter also bears witness to the fact that if enough of it is thrown, then some of it starts to stick.

Now she is old and dearly wants to relive it all by writing it down on paper. She does not attempt a linear recollection, though. Instead she allows time to switch across decades to recall salient events in their context. Throughout we are aware of a crisis that drew the heart from the middle of Nancy’s life. As a result, she was incarcerated for fifteen years.

It is the circumstances that led to this that form the central plank of The Telling’s plot. We begin at the beginning, however, with a childhood that knew abuse, denial and bigotry. Despite this, Nancy grew up. Then, as a young woman, she was packed off to relatives in New York.

They immediately try to remake her in their own image, but her interests are aroused by an acrobatic character she meets in the street. He inhabits a part of the city unknown to her well-heeled hosts. He has the unlucky first name of Chance, and Nancy takes it to become Mrs Brewster. Chance is on the edge of the city’s cultural life. The couple hobnob with writers and other who claim insights into the human condition. Nancy meanwhile becomes a mother and makes a home. She is a giving sort. But the daughter, Eleanor, is a source of concern.

Events conspire further to spell danger for the household. There are crises. Via a mutual friend the Brewsters meet Charles and Isobel. They live abroad, but a change of circumstance brings them to the Brewsters’ cottage in New England as lodgers. The rambling house proves too small for everyone and, according to the record, Nancy suffers a breakdown of sorts, a catastrophe that starts her fifteen year incarceration in institutions. There is a twist, by the way. But, as a result, her own daughter never again entrusts her with the care of her own children.

The Telling is eventually a satisfying read. But I repeatedly felt themes surfacing and then sinking back to the depths, lost, ignored and out of mind. For me it was a novel that lacked coherence. Nancy’s childhood experiences, for instance, were vividly portrayed. One felt there would be consequences, but they were apparently forgotten. By the end I was mildly disappointed by the claim that much of the material was based on the lives of named people. I felt this added nothing to the book or its ideas. These are fairly small criticisms, however, because The Telling remains a worthwhile read.

On Beauty by Zadie Smith

On the face of things the two families featured in Zadie Smith’s On Beauty are fairly functional. The Belsey family lives in New England, near Boston to be more precise. Howard is English and white. Kiki, the wife, is from Florida and is black. There are three intensely sophisticated progeny, Jerome, Levi and Zora. The Kipps family, meanwhile, lives in Old England in a less than fashionable area of north London. Monty and Carlene are black British with Caribbean roots. Their children are the delectable Victoria and an older, cool, already achieving son, who figures little in the tale. Both husbands are academics. Howard is a specialist on art history and is an arch-liberal. His rival, Monty, is almost rabidly neo-conservative. They have feuded for some time, academically speaking, despite their families being on good enough terms to want to stay with one another.

When the story opens, Jerome Belsey is in London and has fallen for the obvious charms of Victoria Kipps and is suggesting engagement. Now wouldn’t that complicate things! As the book progresses we learn that these apparent domestic heavens are less perfect than they appear. The two fathers are not as dedicated to the promotion of domestic harmony as they at first seem. Romances bud and blossom amongst and between the younger members of the plot. 

There are inter-generational liaisons of various kinds. There is also a heightened professional rivalry between Howard and Monty. There ensues an ideological battle that intensifies when Monty joins Howard’s US college on an invitation. Monty tries to stir things up and, as ever, liberals are his prime target. Howard effectively assists by rising to take the bait, trying, as liberals sometimes do, to equalise before he has gone behind. Zora, Howard’s daughter, wants to enrol in a poetry class. There are no places, however, because the tutor – a poet who has a special relationship with Howard – takes in talented candidates who are not actually on the college roll. 

A campaign is launched and Zora, her dad and Monty are in the thick of the argument. Things come to a head when a poor lad from the rough end of town is invited to join the class because of his unique gift for rap. An accommodation must be found. Victoria, Monty’s daughter also figures on campus and she manages to complicate most things simply by looking the way she does. Basically the lives of these families begin to unravel as tensions pull at the frayed ends of their lives. 

Zadie Smith writes with great poignancy and irony. She is particularly successful in characterising the generational gaps, and she does this without ever sounding clichéd or patronising. The sex that simmers throughout just beneath the surface occasionally bubbles through and, when it does, it generally makes quite a mess. In theory, all these people want to do the right thing by and for others, but when opportunities arise, they usually can’t resist the pull of blatant self-interest. They all profess the long view, but in reality they all live for the moment, and that is usually passing. On Beauty is a convincing and moving portrait of modern family life. Zadie Smith consistently resists the temptation to pitch the populist against the elitist. Her characters merely live, and the ups and downs they all suffer are eventually no more than their individual and collective experience.