Yet to this inner truth and all its ramifications I had no access. This was the great role of family history to me.”
This is family history as catharsis. Lessard has a fascinating story to tell, and at times she does this with great skill, notably in the chapter about “The Astor Orphans”, an engagingly batty clutch of aunts and uncles. If the whole book had been written with this stylish clarity it would deserve the accolades heaped upon it in America, but a sentence beginning “When I became literary …” unwittingly signals what has gone wrong.What becoming literary means is demonstrated by the subsequent passage, in which Lessard describes the moment in her thirties when she suddenly became aware of her beloved grandmother’s mortality: “I began to harvest her presence as though it were a field of flax, and I were gathering it into baskets, retting it, combing it, spinning it, and weaving it, until I felt I had something I could hold, and take away with me, like the pillow that I was embroidering.

There was safety for me within the atmosphere of serene crashing. I found grounding in that dizzying environment of orbiting things: it was safe, but it wasn’t, but it was. But it was.” Lessard frequently elaborates images and ideas into this sort of incantatory muzziness.Her ingenious notion of relating Stanford White’s architecture to his moral character is similarly spoiled by overemphasis. His remodelling of a sham Norman castle involved extensive use of “lush pink marble”, a material of which Lessard became uncomfortably aware when she attended the Catholic woman’s college which subsequently occupied the building. The marble “embarrassed” the students, she claims, “because it was so unrestrainedly sensuous, so soft-seeming, with an alternately swirling and mottled grain”. The “voluptuary pink” of this “quasi-bordello environment” may have seemed inappropriate for nuns, but then White had designed it not for a religious order but a newspaper editor.Lessard suggests that White’s buildings “seduce”, “ensnare”, are “powerfully sensual”: “Behind the aesthetic sophistication of a Stanford White interior is the blindly voracious, irresponsible force, both personal and that of a whole class, a whole nation out of control.” You could equally well stand inside one of his buildings and primarily be aware of order and proportion. It depends what you are looking for.Lessard reveals that she was repeatedly fondled by an uncle and that she and her sisters were molested by her father, while another family member was raped by a cousin during a party.

She contends that this incidence of sexual irregularity is somehow related to Stanford White’s compulsive preying on under-age women. But her father, after all, was not a White descendant, but had married into the family.The book ends with an unusual “moment of grace”, when the family silence is breached during what amounts to a group-therapy session at which Lessard and her sisters confront the past and achieve adulthood.Mirabella magazine, to which the author is a contributing editor, said of this book that it is “so crushingly elegant that the act of reading was like running your cheek across a velvet nap”. Anyone who recognises a distinction between literature and a party-frock will be less easily impressed.. The opening of Kate Atkinson’s first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, echoed Tristram Shandy. Her second begins “Call me Isobel …” Such devices can be seen as chutzpah or intertextuality, according to taste. My own feeling was – why shouldn’t she? Intertextual references litter the pages of this vivid and intriguing novel – to Shakespeare especially. This can be a heavy-handed method – a right sinker, indeed – but not here.

Kate Atkinson’s touch is deft, and the story fizzes and crackles along with so many twists and turns that it is well able to carry the freight of Shakespearean allusion and the airy references to higher physics which are integral to the content.
This is a novel about time. The space-time continuum, worm-holes in space, wrinkles in time – all those unimaginable concepts that lend themselves so nicely to fictional exploration. The past in the present is the theme here: hardly a new one, but seldom done with more panache or originality.As in Behind the Scenes at the Museum, the central matter is the dire family secret which preys upon childhood. Isobel and her brother Charles, are mewed up in Arden, the sepulchral suburban home in which they are reared by their dire aunt Vinny after the apparent death of their father and disappearance of the mother Eliza, for whom they pathetically yearn.What happened to Eliza – the how and the why – are the threads which weave in and out of a craftily constructed narrative that takes every possible liberty with sequential tale-telling The novel’s structure reflects the slippery nature of time. Hints and clues of what will happen, or may have happened, are cunningly scattered – unobtrusive at the moment but rearing their heads in retrospect.