f i c t i o n might remain someone else’s baby, sweet but tedious. Or something different might come about.’
Recalling such moments in her fifties, Stella reveals a healthy respect for what she can and cannot control. Experience has lent her wisdom, even if that wisdom accepts that her quest for meaning will never quite be resolved. In this way, Tessa Hadley provides acute observations about English class, gender and economic relations in the second half of the 20th century, without ever once shoving a social critique in the reader’s face. Clever Girl is a remarkable novel by one of this country’s finest, if most unassuming talents. To order this book for £13.59, see the Literary Review Bookshop on page 19
l u c i a n r o b i n s on
What Lives Beneath
Fallen Land By Patrick Flanery (Atlantic Books 422pp £12.99)
Patrick Flanery’s first novel, Absolution, was a delicately wrought portrait of the relationship between a biographer and an acclaimed novelist set against conflicting memories of the opposition to apartheid in South Africa. On publication last year it was justly lauded for its dexterous balance of the fictional and the historical. The same cannot be said of Fallen Land, Flanery’s confused new work. Flanery is an American living in London and this book is set in his homeland. Viewed as American fiction, Fallen Land belongs to the genre that John Dos Passos once disparagingly defined as ‘gentle satire’ and characterised as being ‘usually vague and kindly, sometimes bitter’ in tone. Such stylistic ambivalence permeates Fallen Land. The novel targets many subjects – capitalism, environmental destruction, race, security – while failing to strike any of them cleanly.
Largely set in the recent past, Fallen Land focuses on a house on the outskirts of an indeterminate Midwestern city. A middle-class couple from Boston – Nathaniel and Julia Noailles – have both been offered promotions and decide to move to the city with their seven-year-old son Copley. They want to buy a spacious home and their realtor shows them a house in Dolores Woods, an uncompleted suburban development filled with ‘pastiches of Victorian architecture just out of scale’. The house, a superficially impressive structure crowning the subdivision, previously belonged to the now-bankrupt developer. Julia loves it and, despite Nathaniel’s misgivings about profiting from someone else’s loss, they make the purchase.
The developer, Paul Krovik, was, as we learn in a characteristically clumsy piece of narrative exposition,
not a good man. He went into debt – but serious debt ... He was sued by some of the people who bought the houses in Dolores Woods for failing to complete the work as promised. He could have made good on his guarantees but instead he fought them in the courts and he lost. As a result, he lost his business, and then he lost his family. His wife left him ... And now he’s disappeared completely.
Except that he hasn’t disappeared: Krovik is living alone in a hidden underground bunker connected to the house by a concealed entrance in the basement. His reason has collapsed. His mind swirls with sombre prophecies of a ‘new civil war’; Emerson’s dictums of self-reliance – ‘Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members’ – sustain his delusions.
When the Noailles move in, Krovik initially conceals his nightly trips to the house but, as his rationality warps, so too does his reserve. He defaces the furniture and covers the walls with graffiti. The Noailles blame each other for what seems like poltergeistic japery. Nathaniel thinks their son is responsible while Julia ends up fingering everyone else (‘My son is crazy, my husband may well be crazy’). A familiar scenario of familial disintegration develops.
The story is unoriginal, though it might have worked as a modest novella about a family in crisis. Flanery, however, has grander aims. Numerous subplots fill out the bloated narrative: there is, for instance, a retired black schoolteacher who owned the land before the subdivision’s development and who provides some rather tortured reflections on race and history in the concluding chapter. There is a wayward, DeLillo-esque disquisition on Nathaniel’s company EKK, a cartoonishly evil corporation that acquires contracts in prisons in order to create the ‘largest body of slave labor since the great emancipation’. As in Absolution, Fallen Land alternates between close first-person and distant third-person narrative perspectives, but, whereas in the former novel this multiplicity allowed Flanery to withhold the revelations on which the story’s complexity depended, here it seems like a way of creating intricacies of meaning where there are none. Towards the end of Fallen Land Julia writes of the ‘narrative we now seem unable to escape: the house, and all that is wrong with the house’. Uncharitable as it might seem, it’s tempting to replace ‘house’ with ‘novel’ in that sentence. To order this book for £10.39, see the Literary Review Bookshop on page 19
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