In the Fold

Family Architecture

Of the novelists on the 2006 Man Booker Prize Longlist, several names stand out: Rushdie, Coetzee, McEwan, Ishiguro, [Zadie] Smith. Other names are likely less familiar to American readers (some of them haven't even been published in the States). One of the less familiar writers is, in my opinion, also one of the most grievously overlooked by American readers. Rachel Cusk (who was born in Canada and lived in Los Angeles as a child) won the Whitbread First Novel Award for her debut, Saving Agnes, and won the Somerset Maugham Award for the fantastic The Country Life. Engrossing, and often hilarious, the Booker Prize-nominated In the Fold is just the type of novel readers absorb in a matter of days and recommend over and over again to friends.

In the Fold concerns Michael, an upper-middle class man, married to the increasingly dissatisfied and unreasonable Rebecca. But the novel begins elsewhere, in Michael's memory of a visit to Adam Hanbury's ancestral home, called (by anyone who matters) Egypt. College roommates, Adam and Michael made the trip to Egypt on the occasion of Caris Hanbury's 18th birthday, and thus Michael was initiated into the Hanbury fold (the Hanburys also happen to own sheep). The party delights him. The Hanbury's are wealthy bohemians whose lives are chaotic but sophisticated, and maddeningly narcissistic, but intoxicating for the handful of outsiders invited to participate. At the party, Michael shared a long, memorable kiss with Caris and decided, "I would have to marry her. I would marry her and live with her at Egypt, along with all her family."

Of course, Cusk being a Chekhovian realist (she quotes The Cherry Orchard at the opening of the novel), Caris and Michael do not marry. In fact, they don't see each other again for twenty years. In that expanse of time, Michael has become a lawyer for a non-profit, married Rebecca (the daughter of an eccentric art dealer) and had a son, Hamish. Cusk ends the party scene at Egypt amid fireworks, a view of the sea, and dawn breaking. She then briskly delivers us to the doorstep of Michael's present life in Bath: he is middle-aged, married to a highly emotional, sometimes violent woman, and father to a possibly autistic three-year-old. Though only an hour's drive from the village of Doniford and Egypt, he hasn't spoken to Adam Hanbury for several years.

Cusk's talent for sketching complex relationships and the minutiae of family life is brilliantly displayed here, as it was in The Country Life. She reprises a symbol from that novel, developing it to the level of motif in In the Fold. In both novels she equates manmade structures-usually houses-with human psychology: a room is an expression of a character's emotional state; a building's façade is a representation of the owner's presence. In In the Fold this motif is especially apt, the families here-Michael's in-laws (the Alexanders), and the Hanburys-cling tenaciously to place, to the idea of their presence in the history of a landscape or city. In an early passage, Michael describes Rebecca's family and seamlessly begins describing the Alexanders' home.

Whenever life retreated from [the Alexanders] a step or two their response was always to pursue it and offer more, to attain new heights of risk and ridiculousness. They lived in a big house up the hill in Lansdown, which gave out views of the city that appeared to have been expropriated by conquest and which was so beautiful and original inside that from the first minute I saw it, it could not help but become a factor in my feelings for the Alexanders.

Both the Hanburys and the Alexanders represent something important to Michael, though he seems to have only a vague idea of what. Cusk cunningly equates the Hanburys and the Alexanders making readers wonder if Michael has been looking for the Hanburys his whole life, and found an imitation that has left him dissatisfied. The Alexanders bought their house, after all; it wasn't handed down through the generations. And their ownership is-as the words "expropriated" and "conquest" imply-more an outcome of their aggressive tactics than their innate worth or nobility. The house's beauty not withstanding, Michael's feelings for the Alexanders are clearly mixed.

After a near-fatal incident with a collapsed terrace on the front of their house, and some amazingly vitriolic rants from Rebecca, Michael takes Hamish for a stay with the Hanburys. Adam Hanbury is by this time a consultant in Doniford, living in a newly constructed suburb of the city with his wife, baby and step-daughter. Paul Hanbury, the blustery patriarch of the family, has just been admitted to hospital for prostate surgery, leaving the spring lambing to Adam and local farm-woman, Beverly (who is a delightfully clever character, though she plays a small part in the novel). Michael re-enters the fold, twenty years later, with new eyes: the out-buildings are crumbling with rot; the house is a cavern, attended to by Paul's neurotic, bat-like second wife, Vivian; the finances of the farm are in dire straights; and (the biggest shock of all) Caris, Egypt's muse-home for the first time in years-has grown into a querulous, hairy-lipped, female separatist.

Throughout In the Fold we observe these families through Michael's detached, wry perspective. One of the joys of a Cusk novel is exploring the architecture of her sentences, which often contain richly imagined metaphors. An outfit Michael's wife wore resembles "a complicated piece of Victorian underwear. It was cross-hatched with ribbons and little buttons and straps and it was edged with gathered lace all around the neck, so that in its painstaking envelopment of her form it seemed almost to be expressing love for her." These moments are stunningly frequent, so that each sentence offers some new, startling way of looking at something as commonplace as a pair of boots or a doorway.

Through Michael's observations, the dark, bitter life of Egypt's occupants plays out like Shakespearian drama-often humorous, but ultimately tragic. Soon, Michael learns of the insidious family secret that has been slowly eating away at the foundations of the Hanbury clan and estate. The anticipation of revealing the secret drives much of the novel. It isn't a secret one would expect (incest, insanity, murder) from a novel about warped family psychology. But there is something shocking in the nonchalance with which the Hanburys accept it.

The rot isn't always where you think it is, though. Cusk carefully lays out Michael's problems and then removes him from then, only to put them in higher relief through the Hanburys. Rebecca moves in with her parents, leaving Hamish with Michael, preferring the façade of her parent's perfect marriage to the memory of what she thought she would have with Michael. Memories, like family dynamics, like houses, are built. In a letter to Michael, Rebecca expresses as much:

Do you remember that lovely funny building near your old flat? The one that sat there and sat there with pigeons nesting in the roof and squatters moving in and out, and how we always talked about buying it and turning it into and art gallery or something-and then one day we saw a notice on the door that said 'Change of Use,' and we realized someone else was doing what we'd said we would do and we felt sad, as if something had been stolen from us.

Like Michael's memory of his first visit to Egypt, the "lovely funny building" that could have been theirs was frail, quaint; it was a model of a place that never existed. The end of the novel is charged with complex emotions and is, ultimately, utterly realistic. Cusk's seemingly simple story of two families and their homes, viewed through the eyes of an outsider, is one of the most compelling novels of recent years. It is a gorgeous, satisfying read, and Rachel Cusk is one of the most talented English writers alive.

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