FictionTrapped on the family holiday, a young girl, aged 15, not quite 16, witnesses the closing acts of the marriage only her mother wants to salvage.
Ruth is the eldest of four children and is not particularly close to either of her parents. She is old enough to note her father's emotional detachment while observing the mounting desperation of her mother whose jealous, despairing rages have become an embarrassing sideshow. The dank north of England cottage is miserable, with few comforts; no water supply and an outside toilet possessed of its own terrors. For Ruth, there is her dislike of Amelia, the sister closest to her in age, and then there are her daydreams complete with vague notions of romance.
Jane Feaver's debut deserves the pre-publication praise it has got. "Wonderful" announces poet Carol Ann Duffy on the cover, and it is - this lively, often funny, skilfully handled and shrewdly observed narrative, told partly by Ruth as well as through third person narratives from the perspective of four characters, including Ruth, is superlative domestic realism.
Feaver has looked to the finest of US writers, decided on a tone and sustained it. Her prose moves between the conversational and the literary, at all times the narrative is convincingly and vividly fluent. The imagery is often rich, but Feaver never labours for effect. Ruth is as likeable as she is sympathetic, worried about her spots and already caught up by memories, most notably those of previous holidays. She may be a teenager, becoming aware of boys, notably in the shape of the local farmer's gloomy son, but she is still sufficiently in touch with childhood intrigues to ensure that her imagination engages. She identifies with Bobbie from Nesbit's classic The Railway Children.
Ruth is any girl, any daughter who has watched her patents bicker. Late in the narrative, when a small crime is found out she says, "I was exposed . . . Always before I had felt there was someone on my side . . . someone watching how well I could negotiate a field, how patiently I tolerated everyone . . ." It is this astonishing self-awareness and candour that makes this impressively unsentimental book not only charm but send endless battalions of chills down one's spine.
The family had moved to London some years earlier. John, the father appears to be an arts journalist - it is never quite explained - but then this understatement is, along with the dialogue and characterisation, among the many strengths of what is an exceptional and convincing novel. Feaver never falls into the trap of over explaining, or of becoming dependent on too many details. Nothing is contrived. Instead there is a gradual and subtle flow of information released slowly, almost by the way.
The annual endurance test of each summer sees the parents and the children temporarily almost part of the local community. Not that the community is all that closely knit, as Ruth reports: "At the cottage, we can go for weeks and not see anyone." But there is Cyril the milkman, who calls three times a week and should Lizzie, Ruth's mother, be open to a chat, Cyril likes to talk and knows how to tell a story. One such exchange reveals an astonishing fact. Not only did Mr Burden, the neighbouring farmer, recently lose one of his two sons in a tragic accident with a tractor, some 20 years previously his brother had killed himself.
This revelation is then used to good effect when looking at the strained relations between Ruth's parents. The more the father pulls away, the more tenacious are her mother's attacks. Her mother seizes on the gossip as if it were an offering and brings it to her husband in triumph as a way of making conversation. She waits for his attention and delivers her news, "with" as Ruth reports, "the satisfaction of seeing his fingers drop". Intent on extending the conversation, the mother adds, "But think how terrible? Twice!" Her husband maintains his lordly distance. " 'Not exactly twice. The boy didn't kill himself, did he? It was an accident.' " Ruth notes her mother's irritation and the fact that her mother insists on there being two deaths, regardless of the circumstances.
"Daddy sighs, still not willing to concede to her. 'I think you'll find that killing yourself is a bit different . . . And there's a difference again, isn't there, between people who say they're going to do it and those who actually pull it off - quite a big difference!' 'Is that supposed to be a dig at me?'"
Throughout the narrative, Mummy consistently fails to engage any support. Even her children have lost all patience with her determination to keep a man who no longer wants her. Far more interesting than self-absorbed Mummy is Alison, the traumatised mother of the dead boy. Her marriage may not quite be a battlefield, but nor does it offer comfort. either. She has her own demons. Alone in the downstairs lavatory, she takes out a small bottle in which she keeps emergency sherry. "The drink in her brain is a mouse behind the skirting, doing its work . . . She remembers those first mornings after the accident when she'd woken in panic feeling that the bed was being pulled from under her . . .". Alison and her husband, Graham, are studies in grief. They emerge as individuals, not stereotypes. They also deflect the tensions tearing Ruth's parents apart.
Interestingly, the children stand apart from their parents and take no sides. It is as Ruth observes when recalling her young brother Jack as he was when he was a baby. "He was sweet then, with long curly hair just like a girl. Then so quickly he'd become like all of us, fighting his own corner, not giving an inch to the others."
This is a memorable debut - and a confident book; Ruth is sensitive without being fragile or bitter. There are no easy laughs, no sentimentality. Feaver is witty and inventive. Above all, she is sufficiently daring to allow truth and memory freedom to shape scenes that convince. The choreography is seamless, each character lives off the page and the narrative is as inevitable as it is unpredictable.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
According to Ruth By Jane Feaver Harvill Secker, 214pp. £12.99
