Parenthood and Patchett in this week’s literary fiction: Whistler by Ann
Whistler by Ann Patchett (Bloomsbury £20, 304pp)
The folksy, ruminative novels of Patchett sit adjacent to those of Anne Tyler but where Tyler is a master at quiet discomfort, these days the Tom Lake author offers tasteful novels about saintly people living thoughtful lives.
While visiting an art gallery with her husband, Daphne, a fifty- something English teacher, bumps into her beloved, but long vanished, stepfather Eddie.
Years ago, Eddie was forced by her mother to leave the family following a car crash involving him and nine-year-old Daphne, but Daphne – who shared a strong bond with Eddie – has never fully understood why.
As the pair re-establish their relationship, Patchett spins a tender but insipid yarn about resilience, reconciliation and mortality. It’s all achingly nice and wholesome but Daphne is a curiously dreary narrator and her story fails to soar.
Natural Disaster by Lisa Owens (Virago £16.99, 208pp)
Plenty of female novelists have written about the nightmarish disorientations of early parenthood. Few have done so with the comic finesse Owens applies here.
A nameless mother plans ‘a special day’ with her children, aged four and one, to mark her last day of maternity leave before she returns to work.
Unsurprisingly, things don’t go according to plan.
Owens ploughs well-trodden territory with spiky wit and unsentimental pathos, exposing the precariously thin line between domestic order and absolute carnage with particular panache.
The commercial iteration of this sort of book is now all but exhausted but I laughed out loud at this beautifully executed superior version a lot.
The Devoted by Catherine Cho (4th Estate £16.99, 368pp)
This lyrical thriller is narrated by Eunha, a lonely Hong Kong housewife in a loveless, adulterous marriage, for whom everything changes when her adored three-year-old son, Minsuk, is kidnapped.
The boy is soon returned, thanks to the intervention of Eunha’s brother Solomon – who is the head of the same triad gang once led by their father – but as Cho skilfully makes clear, Eunha’s nightmare is far from over.
Eunha had attempted to escape the trajectory of her brother and father by marrying into a respectable Hong Kong family but following Minsuk’s kidnapping finds herself sucked back to her old life, not least thanks to the reappearance of a former love, Kai.
Cho, whose memoir, Inferno, about postpartum psychosis was a best-seller, is particularly good on the seamless participation of Hong Kong’s criminal underworld within polite society. Slippery and compulsive.