Two Irish writers come immediately to my mind when considering novels written by men entirely from the point of view of a woman: Brian Moore (I Am Mary Dunne) and Dermot Bolger (Father's Music). It's little to do with remembering to put your tights on in the morning. It's all about voice: the true note that must rise from any part of any page.
Douglas Kennedy is an American, but his Irish connections are strong. He went to Trinity, ran the Peacock Theatre and worked as a journalist here before taking off on the wings of chance to London where he wrote a successful thriller, The Big Picture. The Pursuit of Happiness is written from the point of view of two women, Kate and Sara. Kate, the sort of New Yorker who takes no prisoners, has just buried her mother. Out of the blue a mysterious older woman, Sara, pops up and says she wishes to meet. Despite Kate's resistance, Sara, a writer, insists. She reveals an intimate knowledge of Kate's life since childhood, a closeness which she elaborates on by way of her narrative which occupies most of this long, very New York, period story.
Sara's story tells how she meets Jack Malone, Kate's father, at a Thanksgiving party in Manhattan in 1945. She falls in love with him. Their on-off affair in the years that follow takes in the heat of the McCarthy era, a time when good Americans shop their fellow citizens as Communists and the FBI under the appalling J. Edgar Hoover has decent people ruined for the crime of "moral turpitude". Sara's brother, Eric, a comedy writer with NBC, was once a member of the Communist Party and is a homosexual. In the America of the early 1950s, he is a marked man.
Jack Malone is a thoroughgoing cad and a moral coward. It is a tribute to Kennedy that he maintains and develops Sara's likeable individuality despite the fact that the central obsession of her life is a sleazeball. Some of the best realised passages are those when Jack is absent, such as when Sara marries George, a man she does not love, and must deal with his monster of a mother, a woman who regards Sara as a breeding project. And when the moral guardians of America get their hands on Eric, the result is heartbreaking. At times Kennedy becomes bogged down in the minutiae of Sara's daily life, not allowing the reader's imagination any freedom. There are a number of instances, too, where the dialogue is overlong. Yet, this is a big, ambitious book which not only concerns itself with the difficult nature of forgiveness, but also with the mysterious gaps of knowledge about the generation just gone by, a mystery that every family understands. There is a steady accumulation of momentum, the storytelling is accomplished and the characters of the women, particularly Sara's true and singular voice, stay in the mind well after the last page.
Peter Cunningham's new novel, Love in One Edition, has just been published by Harvill
Douglas Kennedy will be reading from The Pursuit of Happiness on Wednesday 18th April in Waterstones, Dawson Street, Dublin at 6 p.m.