Forging Her Own Path

Saltwater, Jessica Andrews, Sceptre, 2019, 304pp, £16.99 (hardback)

Kudos, Rachel Cusk, Faber and Faber, 2019, 240pp, £8.99 (paperback)

Although marketed as a Fleabag-esque tale of the travails of a young woman navigating her life in London, the beating heart of Jessica Andrews’s debut novel Saltwater is the poignant account of a child’s grim upbringing in a dysfunctional family in Sunderland.

Andrews details, in largely unpitying prose, the protagonist Lucy’s recollections of a childhood overshadowed by the periodic disappearances of an alcoholic father. Her mother emerges from these pages as a heroic figure. Having hidden her second pregnancy for fear of triggering another absence due to the ‘evidence’ that it would provide that ‘time was moving forward and life was happening’, she is left with the burden of care for a child who has three holes in his heart, is deaf and, on growing up, exhibits severe behavioural difficulties. Lucy’s father’s response to his son’s ill health is to take to his bed and drink – issuing complaints that he is dying – while her mother is left with the task of visiting specialists, learning sign language and patiently sitting through her son’s tantrums. At times she struggles to cope; a report on the car radio that a woman has jumped from a viaduct along with her autistic son triggers a breakdown. Lucy finds a route out of her grim home life through education. Her excellent A-level results enable her to go and study at a London university – although her working class background, Northern accent and lack of financial support bring with them difficulties of their own.

Andrews writes with a lyrical turn of phrase, animated by light and poetic images. Of how her mother protected her when she was little Lucy muses: ‘my mother blew a pink bubble and kept us safe inside it, where sharp

reality could not pierce. I never once heard her say the words alcoholic or depression’. The narrative is littered with signifiers of 90s culture (S Club 7, The Little Mermaid swimming costumes, parma violets) which are lyrically crafted into elegiac slivers of Lucy’s childhood: she remembers ‘Calpol kisses’, being ‘Wrapped up in arnica, bitter and sweet’ and ‘Rollerskating down hills on one foot like a pink flamingo’. The narrative voice is wide-eyed and whimsical and Andrews is particularly adept at capturing a child’s perspective on trauma in which odd and mundane details are attended to while distressing events play out seemingly unheeded.

There is a problem however with the adult voice of the narrator who all too often wants to impose an emotion or meaning onto an event. A description of a summer in which all the children in Lucy’s cul-de-sac play in her mother’s garden concludes with a visit from two strangers collecting charitable donations. They return to the garden explaining:

‘We’re on our way back to the church but just wanted to call in again. There is such a feeling of love here.’ My mother bit her lip and blinked back tears because they were right. There was so much love.

In a similar vein when Lucy’s mother visits a heart specialist the narrator redundantly notes, ‘He was a doctor of physical hearts, the type that pulse beneath ribs and lungs, but not the other type, the raw kind we couldn’t see’. Or take the moment when Lucy drops her grandfather’s plate and realises that it is too broken to attempt to mend. Andrews overeggs its already overt symbolism with Lucy’s realisation that ‘sometimes things are just broken, and it is better to leave them that way’. In a plot driven novel these false notes are more easily subsumed. But Andrews’s narrative is fragmented into a series of disconnected passages in which elements of the banal or sentiment are all-the-more foregrounded.

By contrast one of the most distinctive features of Rachel Cusk’s novel Kudos – similarly composed of observational snippets – is the way she resists presenting the anecdotes with a clear way of being read. Faye,

the heroine also of the earlier novels in the trilogy Outline and Transit, continues her auditory picaresque – this time the receptacle of tales from strangers at a writer’s convention.

Encounters that seem to be illustrations of a particular ‘type’, if not subverting the reader’s expectation, drift off into something much less tangible. The novel opens with a buffoonish businessman telling Faye at length about his family dog to stop himself from falling asleep and for the same reason his long legs splaying out in the aisle – to the wrath of the air stewardess. After his initial boorish co-option of Faye’s attention and brusque dismissals of the air stewardess’s complaints his story turns into a tender account of how he carefully trained a dog to look after his family in the knowledge that his work would take him continually from home. As if cognisant of the purpose to which it had been reared, the dog, on his retirement, has duly died. His fatigue has been caused by staying up all night with the dying hound and attending to its burial. Later Faye encounters an interviewer committed to promoting the voices of women in the arts, who talks to Faye at length about her favourite artists and her own quest for acceptance in a male-dominated industry. This lecture is delivered to Faye in conspiratorial tone – the interviewer continually pauses to direct knowing looks at Faye about the mistakes made by the male crew with which they are surrounded, confident in the ‘us against them’ tenor of the dialogue. But although she questions Faye on her own thoughts she never pauses to hear them, nor does the interview ever actually take place (the studio equipment breaks).

It is in detailing oddities, quirks and discordant notes that Cusk’s narrative excels. In her encounter with the interviewer Faye registers the disjunct of authenticity and artifice in the appearance of a ‘complicit smile’ while being glimpsed at out of a ‘painted eye’. Having mused at the strange conjunction of a woman’s glamorous footwear – elegantly interlaced sandals – coupled with unbrushed hair, she later comes across a writing acquaintance who now seems deeply unwell. However, a short while into their conversation she realises ‘the signs of misfortune were in fact those of success […] these two extremities could be mistaken for one another so easily’. His sagging

skin is due to diet, his baggy suit is ‘of a fashionably unstructured design’, and, as with his carefully disordered hair, ‘clearly expensive’.

Faye’s passivity and willingness to listen engenders a confessional tone in her interlocutors, who are loquacious about their foibles and selfdeceptions. One woman admits to Faye that the closest she ever felt to her husband was during her sister’s distressed visits to them while undergoing a difficult divorce. Another woman confesses to feeling pushed out of the family dynamic due to the affection her husband and daughter have developed for a hamster – a beast that she has recently come to feel more warmly towards once she realised her ambivalence over the prospect of her husband’s attentions returning to her. A publisher speculates that it is people’s dislike of books that leads them to encourage their children to read: it is ‘their forgotten suffering at the hands of literary texts’ that leaves ‘behind this residue of respect for books; if, that is, psychoanalysts are to be believed when they say we are unconsciously drawn to the repetition of painful experiences’.

It is in crisp, spartan prose that Cusk’s minutely observed narrative is conveyed. The tone is unsentimental, even uninterested – this is the human condition, it seems to say, so what? Just occasionally its coldly observational tenor slides towards the snide. Towards the end of the festival Faye muses that a bald man looks a like ‘an oversized baby’, while the final image the novel provides is of a man urinating into the sea with an air of ‘malevolent delight’. It is as if an alien of superior intelligence has come to observe the human life form and, having dutifully noted its finding, turned away with an imperceptible but definite shudder.