Book review: This Strange and Eventful History should work. As the blurb says, it has “historical sweep”: it covers three generations of a family in many different places, and it’s long. Length itself, of course, is not necessarily a problem, but what you do with all those words and all that geography is another matter.
First, the people. The novel begins in June, 1940 as Paris falls to the Germans, and Gaston Cassar, working as a naval attaché in Salonica (now Thessaloniki), Greece, is missing his wife Lucienne, son François and daughter Denise, who are exiled in Algeria. From there, Claire Messud takes her readers on until 2010, alighting on various dates and locations as she goes and moving her lens between the stiflingly devoted marriage of Gaston and Lucienne, the spiky relationship of François and his Canadian wife Barbara (and later the experiences of their daughter Chloe), and the difficult life of Denise.
Messud, the author of several earlier novels, can write. She shows intelligence and insight in her examination of personalities and how they intertwine and react to their circumstances, and she is not afraid to tackle the big subjects, such as alcoholism or Alzheimer’s.
Her scope also includes politics, religion and the unlovely aspects of international industry. She successfully draws her readers into a range of settings – whether Australia, where François and his family make their home for some years, the South of France, Toronto or several areas of the United States.
There is, however, a good deal that Messud either does not do well or does far too often. If you’re going to write a novel of 400-plus pages, you must immediately grab the readers’ attention and not let go. They must feel compelled to follow. But here, there is very frequently an enormous amount of exposition – long unrelieved sections of telling that become exhausting and which distance rather than involve. The effect can be oddly disinterested and non-fictional. Problematical, too, and wearying, are the endless rhetorical questions.
Some sections, perhaps where Messud is more relaxed or less reliant on research, do spring to life and remain in the mind, such as François’ visit, as a young man, to Florida and Cuba. But her sincere and strenuous efforts to describe emotions, such as François’ dependence on Lucienne, which is laid out more than once, make it hard to feel real empathy with the characters. Readers need to see and hear these people, not constantly be told about them.
It is tough to keep moving forward chronologically while providing backstory and outlining the present circumstances and environment, and Messud manages this to and fro reasonably well, but she fails to understand the art of the subtle touchdown, the tiny reminder.
There is considerable repetition and some curious, jarring anticipations. Firmer and more understanding editing, and some stringent cutting, would have helped, but Messud lacks the skill to fully achieve the large task she has set herself and the novel founders under its own weight.
There were parts to enjoy, but the more I read, the more I found myself just wanting it to stop, yearning to be released from the suffocation of so much explanation, longing to be given room to breathe and infer and respond. And I could not help but think of other writers of big books – the much-lamented Hilary Mantel, or Donna Tartt, say, or the late AS Byatt and, long before them, George Eliot – whose fiction seizes the imagination, makes page turning a pleasure rather than a task, and possesses a vigour and agility that are, sadly, missing from This Strange Eventful History.
This Strange and Eventful History by Claire Messud (Fleet, $37.99) is out now.
