Real drama of what happens after the wedding bells stop
Based around becoming a parent, Kate Davies’s second novel is as gripping as any thriller, writes Marianne Levy
On the front page of the website of a leading DNA testing kit provider, there is a box labelled “Important test info”. When clicked, it explains how its service can help you learn about genetic health risks and carrier status. Nowhere does it say that for that mere £99 you might also discover that the man who raised you is not your biological father.
It is this premise that kickstarts Nuclear Family, the second novel from Polari prizewinning writer Kate Davies. Just before Christmas, 35-yearold Lena panic-purchases DNA testing kits for her father Tom and twin sister Alison. “All over the world, strangers were doing the same, innocently buying incendiary devices that they would wrap beautifully and leave under Christmas trees, ready to detonate on the twentyfifth of December.”
Widow Tom is forced to admit that he and his late wife conceived their daughters with donor sperm; the book then follows each of the three as they grapple with the fallout. The news does not derail Lena’s twin Alison, perhaps in part because she and her wife Suria are trying to start a family using donor sperm themselves.
But for Lena, who in the wake of their mother’s death has committed to starting a family with her husband Adam, things are more complicated. She becomes obsessed with tracking down her biological father – a way, perhaps, of putting to one side her increasing ambivalence about becoming a mother herself.
The three characters’ viewpoints illuminate the hidden landscapes of family life; the pressure cooker of women’s early thirties, the unseen physical ravages of fertility treatment, the need. Alison yearns for a child but, unlike her wife, cannot bring herself to carry one: “Her body just knew she wasn’t supposed to carry a baby, the way it knew when she was hungry.” In contrast to Alison and Suria’s longing to become parents, Lena’s terror at the thought of impending motherhood radiates from the page.
This is a story driven by desire and its conflicts. There is sexual desire – as in her previous book, In at the Deep End, Davies does not look away when the characters enter the bedroom. Then there are other desires, hard to pin down and harder still to satisfy: who are we? What do we want? How can we feel safe, and loved? How do we make our families, sustain and nourish them? And, when the unexpected happens, how do we keep them from pulling apart?
Which is not to suggest that
this is simply a book of ideas. The story takes great interest in both the visceral aspects of conception – the orgasms and tears – and the emotional, giving even weighting to the two. And there’s no playing down of some of procreation’s most horrendous outcomes; in one scene, beautifully drawn and employing the very bleakest humour, a miscarried foetus is kept fresh for genetic testing using Tupperware and a wine cooler.
Age, sexual orientation and gender are considered with depth and nuance, each a different lens through which to contemplate what “family” might mean, how it might look and feel, how it can be achieved. And Nuclear Family is a discomforting riposte to anyone who assumes, like Alison at the start of the book, that having children is always straightforward, “like signing up for an allotment”.
It’s as gripping as any thriller, the characters careering through the barely controlled chaos of IVF, forming ill-advised relationships with complete strangers on social media and trying, with varying degrees of success, to manage emotions that will not be contained. For those who have always believed that a happy ending involves a white dress and a nice sunset, this book is the riveting proof that after the wedding bells stop ringing, some of life’s most fascinating, extraordinary and vital stories are only just getting started.
How do we make our families, sustain and nourish them?