Upstate
James Wood
(Jonathan Cape, £14.99)
Review by Rosemary Goring
Renowned literary critic James Wood’s first novel, The Book Against God, was the darkly witty story of a compulsive liar struggling against his devoutly Christian parents’ beliefs. It was a crackling,
heart-sore book, delving into painful territory recognisable to any who had a religious upbringing from which they have tried to flee.
His second novel touches on some of the same ground but in a markedly different manner. With Upstate, Wood turns the tables, being an episode in which a father finds himself, a little reluctantly, in the company of his children. Alan Querry, from whose perspective the novel is mainly viewed, is a businessman from north-east England. His elder daughter Vanessa lives in Saratoga Springs, in upstate New York, where, like the protagonist in The Book Against God, she teaches philosophy. Her sister Helen is a high-flier in the music industry. Set in the years when the prospect of Senator Barack Obama running for president seemed too good to be true, it is far enough at a remove from the present to have a patina of age. Yet, despite the technological and political revolutions still to happen, Upstate could be taking place today.
Underlying these uneasy relationships is the trauma of Alan’s wife walking out on him when the girls were young and her death some years later. Helen coped well, but Vanessa did not. A disturbing period when she was at university returns to Alan as he flies with Helen to America. Had she tried to harm herself? Remembering the unspoken word, suicide, he reflects, “He had to look away from it, as from the sun. And perhaps it was true, he now thought, that because he looked away from that, he had also looked away from another word, depression.” Many of his thoughts are in italics.
An email from Vanessa’s partner has alerted them to an accident that might have been more than that and they hurry to her side. As the family reunites, meeting Vanessa’s argumentative and flirtatious young lover, tensions old and new arise. There are some memorable lines, as when Helen is disagreeable with her sister, “as if she were necessary medicine that Vanessa just had to take”. Earlier, Alan watches a fire engine “clanking its chains like an angry ghost”.
There are many angry ghosts here, crossing the Atlantic with ease. On one side, the old, repressed world of tradition, on the other the confidently new. Upstate is a book about being broken, people and nations both. This might in part explain why it too feels less than whole. Beneath the recognition of a family disabled by unhealed grief and rage lies the mortifying submission of Britain to the brasher USA. Brits, thinks Alan, “had meekly let the Americans come and restock the shelves with their own merchandise”. He takes great satisfaction from the business he has built, seeing himself as part of an unstoppable onward wave:
“Alan was proud that his grandfather had been a miner, while his father had risen – yes risen up out of the bloody ground – to become a ship’s engineer and then to become the owner of a big shop in Durham, and that he himself had risen to become a property developer who drove a big Audi. David begat George, and George begat Alan, and Alan begat Helen and Vanessa. That was the march of generations, because something had actually been generated. Growth, in a word.” But all that he has worked towards is in peril, he and his partner having over-reached themselves. Not that he can tell his daughters. He cringes to recall the day his own dad asked him for £100. Now, however, it is clear that if he is emotionally to thrive, he too must humble himself enough to ask one of his daughters for help.
No ends are tied, which is as it should be, yet there is a sense of incompleteness about Upstate that has nothing to do with plot. At times it is engaging, but at others forced and uneven. So too the writing, which can sing, but in places feels rushed. Perhaps that is the problem. The matters Wood is handling are Trollopian in range yet he does not give them quite enough space to breathe or develop. A rich and slow-burn tale such as this might have benefited from a more expansive pace, giving the reader longer in which to enjoy it.
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