“It’s nothing like enough to soothe him. He is, her sister once said, a gaping maw.” Meet Ray Hanrahan, life and soul of every party, as long as he’s the centre of attention, a notoriously narcissistic artist more famous for his tantrums than his art. Charlotte Mendelson’s The Exhibitionist, published earlier this year, follows Ray and his beleaguered family over the course of a weekend in the run-up to his first exhibition in decades.
Now in his 60s, Ray is a delightful mesh of the ages: inconsolable infant, petulant teenager, precocious young man, infirm senior. He is also a complete monster, almost to the point of incredulity in early chapters, but it is Mendelson’s great talent as a writer that the more monstrous Ray becomes over the course of her feverish narrative, the more believable he seems.
Anyone who has recently watched Sharon Horgan’s Bad Sisters will recognise the type: villain with a capital V, grotesque, satirical, blackly funny, exaggeration that seeks to highlight real grief and pain. In The Exhibitionist, the humanity comes from the wider family, Ray’s wife and fellow artist Lucia, daughters Leah and Jess, stepson Patrick, whose lives have been stalled, stunted, stolen by the man at the helm of their large, decrepit house in north London.
An omniscient third narrator flits between the perspectives of these characters so effectively that their traumas are felt within pages. We see Ray through their eyes. His bullying behaviour, snide remarks, the nicknames he has for Lucia: “Bolsh, for bolshy. Moo, for cow. Piece, for nasty piece of work. He claims they’re affectionate but forgets that she asks him to stop.” Ray professes to love entertaining but it’s Lucia who does all the housework. He manipulates his eldest daughter into being his personal slave. He constantly denigrates his stepson’s efforts to make a life for himself. He wages war on his youngest daughter for having the temerity to move to Edinburgh. In short, he views people only in relation to how they can serve him.
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The danger of such a huge personality, in narrative terms, is that it can eclipse the other characters but Mendelson counters this by never giving Ray’s point of view, which is the correct stylistic choice. Instead the book belongs to Lucia, a talented artist who has sacrificed her career to support her ungrateful husband. This has shades of Meg Wolitzer’s The Wife, and the novels of Jonathan Franzen and AM Homes. The tone is similar too: funny, furious, frenzied. There is great dexterity in how the book is told, a propulsive pace, with the constantly shifting perspectives and short scenes leaving the impression of being trapped in a nightmare, binding the reader to the monster, just as his family are bound.
The prose is another boon, arresting lines and imagery, nothing easy, dull or hackneyed. Occasionally this can be tiring for the reader – there is nowhere to rest – but one suspects that is the point. Throughout, Mendelson has commendable control over the narrative, a sense of authority in the chaos. It earned her novel a place on the longlist for this year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction. Other accolades to date for her four previous novels include a Booker longlisting, the Somerset Maugham Award and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize.
Perhaps the biggest success of The Exhibitionist is its shape-shifting ability to cover so much territory over the course of a relatively short timeframe. Toxic marriages, coercive control, dysfunctional families, art monsters, infidelity, queer desire, cancer. There is a Woolf-esque cacophony to the party set pieces and a marked intensity to the more private scenes between Lucia and a new lover. Crucially, the affair gives Lucia her own outline, away from Ray, a burgeoning sense of another kind of life, where her art and sense of self could flourish: “She can only think of him, her husband; how much he’ll hate [her work], if it’s good. So instead she dreams of filthy acts against blond-oak cupboards, in an office above Westminster Tube station.”
Mendelson gives a very convincing portrayal of infidelity, by turns ridiculous, all-consuming, erotic, banal. She is careful to avoid trite dichotomies. Lucia’s lover is no angel to Ray’s villain; the affair could end up hurting her as much if not more than her marriage. These kinds of undercurrents, left to the reader to decipher, offer some stunning moments. A standout example is daughter Jess’s comment on the subject of one of her father’s new paintings, when they are finally unveiled in all their unremarkable mediocrity. Given as an aside, the line contains a whole other book in one short sentence: “Even at this distance, over the heads of the populace, Jess sees that it has her sister’s eyes.” Moments such as these remain long after reading The Exhibitionist, an enduring impression, the essence of art.
