The Outside Lands

Hannah Kohler

Picador, £7.99

Review by Alastair Mabbott

ONE of the most remarkable aspects of this novel is that the author is an Englishwoman who grew up on the south coast, studied at Cambridge and now lives in East Finchley. However, she writes with such ease and confidence about California in the 1960s that you could be forgiven for assuming she spent her childhood wolfing down milk and Oreos in front of The Andy Griffith Show.

Her story begins in 1963, when Jeannie Jackson (aged 19) and her younger brother Kip (14), lose their mother in a road accident. Her death sends shock waves reverberating through their lives and leaves a gaping hole at the heart of the family which Jeannie realises too late she was expected to fill.

Contrary to the idyllic image suburban America liked to present to the world back then, Jeannie and Kip’s formative years have hidden undercurrents of darkness and death. While the Vietnam War is claiming thousands of young American lives overseas, at home Kip’s friends get beaten black and blue by their fathers, they drink and steal, and one of his closest buddies gets so wasted he smashes his car fatally into a tree. Kip is in danger of becoming a delinquent, and a judge gives him the choice of finishing high school or joining the armed forces. He chooses the latter.

Jeannie, meanwhile, has the good fortune to become engaged to a doctor from a wealthy family with a snobbish, controlling matriarch who can’t help but look down on the “gold-digger” who has ensnared her son. But, once she’s married and has her first child, another member of her husband’s family notices her: his cousin Lee, a 16-year-old girl who comes on to Jeannie at a party. To her surprise, Jeannie responds to Lee’s advances and the two begin a clandestine affair. This would be scandalous enough to her staunchly Republican in-laws, but her relationship with Lee also leads Jeannie towards the anti-war movement and a draft-dodging operation.

And then something happens that makes Jeannie’s covert activities pale in comparison. It involves Kip, it happens in Vietnam, and it will scar the lives of everyone touched by it, forever.

What’s the trigger that set off this tragic train of events? The death of their mother? The time Kip was pressured into throwing a brick through a liquor store window? The point at which Jeannie failed to dissuade Kip from joining the army? It feels pointless to apportion blame for events which seem to have a dreadful momentum all of their own.

It’s an impressive, even extraordinary, debut. Despite her melodramatic scenario, Kohler writes with sensitivity, undercutting the story’s more sensational aspects with moments of insight and intimacy. Tracing lines between the horrors of Vietnam and family life in 1960s America, she evokes an era in which the country was on the brink of a painful transition; a country in which none of its characters, young or old, seem quite at home.

Hannah Kohler will be at Glasgow book festival Aye Write!, March 11, 6.30pm. The Herald and Sunday Herald are the event's media partners.