Review: Vivien Horler
The Homemade God, by Rachel Joyce (Doubleday)
Vic Kemp is a successful London artist who has made a fortune from the sort of work that gets printed on T-shirts, posters, greeting cards and even coasters.
The pictures are semi-erotic depictions of high-heeled women in red lipstick meeting suited men in pools of lamplight. When the only journalist who ever interviews him asks if his work is really about his own sexual fantasies, Vic laughs. If people can’t face a bit of fun between consenting adults, they are fools, he says.
It might not be high art, but it has earned Vic enough to have a flat in London, a studio not too far away, and a crumbling villa on an island in an Italian lake where his four children have spent their summers growing up, learning to swim and smoke and drink.
They are Netta, a cool and successful lawyer who, like her father, drinks too much; Susan, a wife and stepmother who cooks like a dream and longs to be a chef; Gustav, known as Goose, who once had artistic dreams of his own until they were shot down by his father and who now runs his father’s studio; and the youngest, Iris, who works in a restaurant and isn’t getting anywhere. Netta is 40, Iris 33.
Their mother died when Goose was three – he barely remembers her and Iris doesn’t at all, which may be why they are all so protective of her.
But now Vic has summoned them to lunch at a noodle bar in Soho because he has big news. They are expectant: maybe he’s going to tell them he has finished what he has to proclaimed to be his major life’s work, a huge Frenchdoors-sized painting that will seal his legacy.
But no. He says he is to marry another artist, Bella-Mae Gonzales, who is just 27, six years younger than Iris. The children are not invited to the ceremony, but they are welcome to join him and Bella-Mae in Italy for a holiday afterwards.
Gobsmacked, the siblings try to respond with good grace. Vic never remarried since their mother’s death, but he has been fairly profligate. The kids know he slept with virtually every one of their au pairs.
After lunch at the noodle bar the siblings go off for a drink to expostulate. Who is Bella-Mae, and what does she want? She’s a bit of a mystery – not on Instagram nor Facebook, not online at all in fact.
Netta suggests they deal with the situation by essentially ghosting Vic – they will not go to Italy, they will not be in touch, they will ignore the entire episode. Goose points out that Vic usually needs some inspiration for a new work, maybe that’s Bella-Mae’s role and as soon as the painting is done he will drop her.
Weeks pass, and then comes the devastating news – Vic has drowned in the lake. The kids cannot believe it – he knew the lake well, taught them all to swim there, and never took chances.
Together they go to Italy to bring their father’s body home. But first they have to meet Bella-Mae.
And this once close family unravels.
Rachel Joyce has a wonderful ear for dialogue, and the sort of conversations sisters often have (like Vic’s adult children, I’m one of three sisters and a brother, and I know what it sounds like).
At a lunch on the island, held to celebrate Vic’s life, they all get very, very drunk. And things go badly downhill.
At one point they turn on Iris – why was she the only daughter he painted? She counters that she was the only one who would sit stlll. And why did only she have keys to Vic’s London flat?
Iris yells: “Because I lived around the corner, Susan! You live in Tunbridge Wells!”
Then Susan turns on Netta, saying it’s all her fault. “If it wasn’t for you, insisting on the autopsy, and sending everyone to look for the will and the painting, we’d all be home by now. But you went on and on and on. It was all you think about. … You forced us into this. But this what you always do. You push and push and push, because everything has to be your way. You’ve ruined everything.”
And so on. Eish. It rings true.
Meanwhile Bella-Mae watches and listens, a small smile on her face.
So – will the siblings ever get back the old easy relations with each other?
The descriptions of the island and the lake, and the people who have known the family for years, are beautiful. Joyce, author of the best-selling Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, has a real talent for evoking a sense of place. She is a lovely writer – and I believe this is a much more impressive novel than Harold Fry.