Flawed novel is still a page turner
Nicholas Reid finds this novel about a fraught mother-daughter relationship promising even if the dialogue is a little stilted.
Elisa Lodarto deserves praise for the ingenious framing device she has invented for her debut novel. When Katharine Rowan falls down stairs and dies, in what is apparently an accident, her adult daughter Laura reads the pathologist’s official report. The formal language, noting every blemish on Katharine’s body, reminds Laura of key and sometimes traumatic events in her mother’s life.
So the slight scar on Katharine’s ear lobe recalls the moment a woman wrenched one of Katharine’s earrings off, in a rage that Katharine’s husband, Richard, was fooling around with her teenage daughter.
The scars on Katharine’s abdomen remind Laura that her mother had one of her two children by caesarean section. The plate in Katharine’s arm brings back memories of a cycling accident that left Katharine with a multiply fractured arm.
As the daughter ‘‘reads’’ her mother’s body, the book becomes the detailed story of fraught motherdaughter relationships. Episodes in the mother’s life, reconstructed by the daughter, are counterpointed by episodes in the daughter’s life.
From childhood memories, Laura reconstructs her mother’s unhappy marriage. Laura herself has unsatisfactory relationships with men. Parts of the novel are polemical in a feminist fashion, but An Unremarkable Body avoids the trap of demonising men.
Laura’s father, Richard, is a bit of a drip, but the real villain of the piece is Laura’s manipulative grandmother, who managed to make Katharine’s childhood and adolescence wretched. Laura says her mother endured ‘‘writhing obedience to a controlling matriarch’’.
All this is a sound set-up for a pair of character studies and Lodarto makes good use of the London background where Laura works as a freelance journalist. Unfortunately, this interesting idea runs into some major problems.
Lodarto isn’t good at dialogue, so conversations between characters are stilted. Worse, Lodarto has written in the first person, with Laura as narrator. This is credible when Laura is narrating her own life experience.
But the first-person narration becomes unbelievable when Laura narrates every last nuance of her mother’s experience. We are meant to believe that Laura can read every moment of her mother’s thoughts and feelings in a way that would simply not be possible.
Or is Lodarto playing a subtle game? After all, as I read her, Laura is a bit of an airhead. (How many young women would be surprised if a boyfriend did a runner after she’d slept with another guy?)
Could it be that Lodarto wants us to see Laura as an ‘‘unreliable narrator’’, constructing a version of her mother out of wishful thinking?
I doubt it. An Unremarkable Body is too straightforward a novel for such authorial games. In fact, it ends up as a bit of a tease, introducing a suspense element in its last few pages, as well as hiding essential information about Laura’s mother until the last moment.
But you will turn the pages.