On the morning of her daughter’s wedding, June Reid, entirely by chance, eludes a devastating accident. Problems of her own have kept her brooding outside in the early hours while those closest to her sleep on in the house as it is destroyed in a gas explosion. At a time when so many novels are about the evils men do to each other, through various forms of abuse and crime, never mind war, it is unusual to see a writer following the aftermath of a domestic accident. Memoirist and literary agent Bill Clegg’s debut looks at ordinary people connected through living in the same small community as the repercussions of the tragedy seep out elsewhere and involve random onlookers.
On a human level the book has considerable power, the simple harsh fact that a day of expected celebration turns to one of horror. All eyes are on the mother of the dead bride: “She has not cried. Not that day, not at the funerals, not after. She has said little, had had few words when she needs them, so she finds herself only able to nod, shake her head, and wave the concerned and curious away as she would marauding gnats. The fire chief and police officer answered questions more than asked them – the old stove, gas leaking through the night and filling, like liquid, the first floor of the house, a spark most likely from an electric switch or a lighter… the explosion, the instant and all-consuming fire. They did not ask her why she was the only one outside the house at five forty-five in the morning….”
It is eerie, nothing remains. There are no bodies of the victims, who include Lolly, June’s daughter, former husband Adam and Luke, her much younger boyfriend, as well as her daughter’s fiance, Will. Unlike, say, the debris left by Hurricane Sandy which dominates much of the background in Richard Ford’s post-disaster stories, Let Me Be Frank With You, there is a void. June is the main survivor, yet she is also a victim as is another woman, Lydia Reid, the ostracised mother of Luke, golden boy turned convict and potential suspect.
The novel progresses through a number of voices, too many voices, as well as the tighter, more assured third-person narratives offering the main viewpoints. June and Lydia, having previously become closer only to be forced apart by the tragedy, again come together. Between them they share an unbearable burden of guilt and sorrow. Their mutual plight is the reason to not only read this book but to overlook its several instances of heavy-handed writing and superfluous characters, some of whom have personal histories that add nothing to the story. Clegg’s first-person narrators all sound the same, anger mixed with folksy acceptance.
June’s trance-like state, which includes a subsequent flight which is more like a controlled drifting, is the most compelling aspect of the narrative. Slowly, this silent woman comes to life through references to her former self as a highflying art dealer who turned to her career as her marriage fell apart. At times Clegg allows information to merely ease its way towards the surface; elsewhere he ladles it on. June had a difficult relationship with her daughter Lolly, an intimidating princess who as child and young woman always got her way and had always sided with her father.
Dramatic use is made of a postcard once sent by Lolly to her mother. Far less convincing is the subsequent discovery of a letter. Later Clegg includes superfluous material that causes the intensity of the narrative to falter.
In contrast to the silence which descends upon June is the gossip. In a small town, already divided by the people who live there and the wealthy New Yorkers who invade from to time, many of whom own vacation homes which are tended by the resentful locals, the nasty comments are made freely. Even Edith, the florist, has her acidic say:
“They [the young couple] wanted daisies in jelly jars. Local daisies in fifty or so jelly jars they’d collected after they were engaged. Seemed childish to me, especially since June Reid wasn’t exactly putting her daughter’s wedding together on a shoestring. But who am I to have an opinion? Putting daisies in jelly jars is hardly high-level flower arranging… Still, work is work… so you take what you can get.”
Everyone seems to have an opinion and not even the reality of the sudden deaths stop some of the local people from bad-mouthing the dead as well as the bereaved.
Luke, June’s boyfriend, has been working as a handyman following his release from prison. Before things went wrong for him he was a talented swimmer with a future. In the aftermath of the explosion further details about the way lives develop, change and are ruined, emerge. In Lydia, the fallen beauty who has attracted men all her life to her cost, and in June, an interesting study of trauma, Clegg has created believable individuals about whom many harsh things are said by other characters. It is left to the reader to decide the validity of the comments. Clegg leaves no doubts as to the voyeuristic fascination people have in the suffering of others.
At one point on her odyssey across America, June the penitent realises the car is veering out of control. She pulls in at a place that looks to be “more of a grocery store that happens to sell gas than a gas station where anyone knows anything about cars”. A male motorist arrives and she approaches him for help. Before lifting the spare he has to move suitcases, June had forgotten her daughter’s luggage was in the car. Her surprise is believable. The discovery sets her off in a reverie of memory and she walks away. It is very poignant. The man calls her back and she finally returns to reality: “For the first time, far enough away and next to someone she does not know, she cries.”
At times Did You Ever Have A Family reads as a darker variation on the work of Anne Tyler. Clegg has looked to the depths of ordinary existence and it confers a ragged integrity on the narrative. The writing is at times effective, particularly in the sequences involving June and Lydia. But it is also earnest and the first-person sequences are stiff, overly detailed and artificial, as if spoken to camera. The father of Will, the dead fiance, concedes: “I’ve never been one to go to church, but I’ve always believed in a creative intelligence behind the ongoing riddle of the world. To that great force I prayed to guide Will’s soul wherever it was and to protect my family.”
At no time does June’s philandering ex-husband, Adam, who also died in the inferno, become real. Her uneasy relationship with Luke is effectively destroyed when she rejects his proposal, saying “Because you’re not the guy someone like me marries, you’re the guy someone like me ends up with after their marriage is over.”
Clegg’s novel never approaches the elegant menace of Daniel Woodrell’s The Maid’s Version, which is also about a disastrous explosion although one shrouded in ambivalence. Woodrell’s superb novel is high art in a way in which Clegg’s book is not. Yet for all the stylistic unevenness and prose such as “A molten ache returns, turns in her chest, scrapes slowly”, the book does possess emotional truth. Longlisted for this year’s Man Booker, it does not deserve to make the final six. It creaks and groans in the longer, more righteous passages spoken by characters preoccupied with their own stories rather than with the accident, which moves from centre stage far faster than might be expected. Some of the sexual speculation recalls Jeffrey Eugenides’s use of the chorus in The Virgin Suicides. The community is more concerned with human conduct than with how the explosion happened.
It is too easy to pick faults with Did You Ever Have a Family and question the characterisation of the young cokehead Silas and his sexual obsession, as well as much of the plotting and the heavy moralising. Still, the story, with its shocking nothingness at the scene of the accident, the absence of bodies, does linger. June and Lydia remain in the memory. For all the bluster and showmanship of bigger, louder performance novels such as Jonathan Franzen’s Purity, they will be forgotten, whereas Clegg’s small, tenacious book, which could have benefited from being even smaller and having fewer characters and more of June and Lydia – particularly June who has to live with the words “she would do anything to retrieve” – won’t fade all that easily.
Intent on feeling, Clegg is clearly unafraid of melodrama and sentimentality; more talented writers have shown less courage.
Eileen Battersby is literary correspondent
