Class act at family games
By Jonathan Dee |
July 15, 2012, Sunday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
It takes a while for the reader to get the proper hang of Frances Thorpe, the narrator and protagonist of Harriet Lane's debut novel, "Alys, Always," because we meet her at a moment when a crisis has brought out the best in her. Driving home to London one Sunday evening after a visit to her parents in the suburbs, Frances happens upon a car that has flipped onto its side. She pulls over, approaches cautiously and hears from inside the car a woman's voice - not screaming or moaning, but "a sort of muttering," in "a low, conversational tone." The windshield is shattered in such a way as to have turned opaque, and the injured driver cannot be seen; Frances' image of her is formed entirely by her "expensive, cultured voice." Frances, while neither a doctor nor a paramedic - she is just a "subeditor," a copy editor, in the beleaguered books section of a downsizing London newspaper called The Questioner - does what little she can: First she phones for an ambulance, and then she stays beside the car and talks soothingly with the trapped woman, whose name is Alice. The police arrive and, shortly afterwards, Alice dies of her injuries.
Frances is understandably humbled by this encounter. And rather than give in to self-pity while passing a typically uneventful Saturday night alone in her flat, she reminds herself, "You're not so badly off, are you?"
And that, as far as the reader suspects, is who Frances Thorpe is: kind, resourceful under duress, philosophical about her lot. But when Frances learns that the invisible woman she briefly knew as "Alice" was in fact Alys Kyte, the wife of a famous British novelist, Laurence Kyte, her true, ambitious, calculating nature coldly reawakens.
One of the most venerable plots in British literature is that of the young person who tries to vault the class divide by infiltrating someone else's family. Few characters have gone about it as remorselessly as Frances Thorpe, in this highly entertaining and squirm-inducing short novel that Frances herself might reductively pitch to her boss in the books department as "Howards End" meets "All About Eve."
Asked, through a police intermediary, to meet with the bereaved Kyte family at their home in Highgate ("a very different London" from Frances' own) for purposes of "closure," Frances obliges. Alys Kyte's two grown children huddle in the kitchen in heartbroken expectation, with their father and, curiously, his agent. Frances tells them a comforting lie about Alys's last words, establishing a bond of gratitude between the Kyte family and Frances, a bond they are sentimentally loath to dissolve.
Frances herself is quite a sly and patient invention. She impales her family, by whom she is cruelly and undisguisedly embarrassed, and makes no apologies for her campaign to supplant a dead woman. Only occasionally do the other characters suspect a thing; and while her ultimate target, Laurence Kyte, may feel at home determining the panoramic fates of the characters in his novels, his response to the predations of real people proves solipsistic and slow.
"Alys, Always" depicts a world where novelists are appreciated mostly as celebrities, if you can imagine anything quainter than that. Written in the present tense, Lane's breezy, lacerating first novel is less a cynical exercise than a deeply nostalgic one, a kind of blowing on the ember of the days when authors mattered enough to the culture to be valued as superficially as movie stars.
Frances is understandably humbled by this encounter. And rather than give in to self-pity while passing a typically uneventful Saturday night alone in her flat, she reminds herself, "You're not so badly off, are you?"
And that, as far as the reader suspects, is who Frances Thorpe is: kind, resourceful under duress, philosophical about her lot. But when Frances learns that the invisible woman she briefly knew as "Alice" was in fact Alys Kyte, the wife of a famous British novelist, Laurence Kyte, her true, ambitious, calculating nature coldly reawakens.
One of the most venerable plots in British literature is that of the young person who tries to vault the class divide by infiltrating someone else's family. Few characters have gone about it as remorselessly as Frances Thorpe, in this highly entertaining and squirm-inducing short novel that Frances herself might reductively pitch to her boss in the books department as "Howards End" meets "All About Eve."
Asked, through a police intermediary, to meet with the bereaved Kyte family at their home in Highgate ("a very different London" from Frances' own) for purposes of "closure," Frances obliges. Alys Kyte's two grown children huddle in the kitchen in heartbroken expectation, with their father and, curiously, his agent. Frances tells them a comforting lie about Alys's last words, establishing a bond of gratitude between the Kyte family and Frances, a bond they are sentimentally loath to dissolve.
Frances herself is quite a sly and patient invention. She impales her family, by whom she is cruelly and undisguisedly embarrassed, and makes no apologies for her campaign to supplant a dead woman. Only occasionally do the other characters suspect a thing; and while her ultimate target, Laurence Kyte, may feel at home determining the panoramic fates of the characters in his novels, his response to the predations of real people proves solipsistic and slow.
"Alys, Always" depicts a world where novelists are appreciated mostly as celebrities, if you can imagine anything quainter than that. Written in the present tense, Lane's breezy, lacerating first novel is less a cynical exercise than a deeply nostalgic one, a kind of blowing on the ember of the days when authors mattered enough to the culture to be valued as superficially as movie stars.
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