We are not ourselves by Matthew Thomas: upwardly mobile on downward spiral

We Are Not Ourselves

Author: Matthew Thomas

ISBN-13: 978-0007548217

Publisher: Fourth Estate

Guideline Price: £16.99

This mammoth novel is Matthew Thomas’s first, and like many of its kind, it’s a family saga that packs in as much as possible about the ebb and flow of one particular mother, father, and son: the Learys. The action, such as it is, takes place between 1951 and the spring of 2011, a time when upward social mobility was still the hallmark of the American Dream. And no doubt the Learys are at some level emblematic of middle-class attainment during that time, rising from ethnic enclave in the New York City borough of Queens to ownership of a house with a lawn in desirable Bronxville, Westchester County.

At one level, We Are Not Ourselves contemplates this class development, though initially class issues are disguised by ethnic markers. Eileen Leary is the daughter of "Big Mike" Tumulty, a beer-truck driver with chieftain status in their Woodside neighbourhood, while her husband Ed has Kinvara roots. But, like the inherited Catholicism that they practice, this Irish coloration is not anything that sustains or nourishes them; it does not provide a sense of community or a political point of view or anything else in the way of cultural or social anchorage.

On another, more immediate level, though, this is the story of a nuclear family, pretty much out on its own, dictated to largely by its own choices and limitations, the same as their Irish-surnamed friends except that the friends make it to the suburbs before them. Towards the end of the story, Eileen is somewhat taken aback “to think of the world in a permanent state of flux”.

Suburban dreams

But that realisation suggests how her acting like she’s in charge is true only up to a point; the lives of others, and the undercurrent of her suburban dreams, have pulled her along more irresistibly than, for all her strength, she has pushed. The two levels surge and separate throughout. And, as befits a novel set in the New York City area, islands and waters have their part to play in the overall texture, and show up in unexpected forms: baseball fields and shopping malls for the former; highways and new immigrant communities for the latter.

The urge to be sheltered and rooted is counteracted by the impetus to improve, to make something of oneself. But that very urge, as the novel’s seemingly awkward title says, at length discloses that we are neither entirely of our own making nor ourselves to possess. The mix is what matters.

This conclusion is suggested by the back to the future moments that complete the story – back, indeed, to the melting pot (Eileen returns to the old neighbourhood and has her first Indian meal there; her only child Connell will father a child with his Nicaraguan wife). More to the point, mixing is present in more sustained form in the story of the marriage that is the novel’s centrepiece, where the come and go of intimate mingling strikes the dominant thematic note. Eileen, who rises in the ranks of the nursing profession, has stick-in-the-mud Ed for a husband. He is a biology lecturer at a local community college, and has a successful career as well, though his refusal to take a position first with Big Pharma and then at New York University galls his wife.

Dedicated to doing good with his educationally sub-par students, Ed also has no inclination whatever to move from the family's Jackson Heights location, even when Eileen is spooked by the area's changing racial composition (some honest writing about racial attitudes here). Then one day (as We Are Not Ourselves is wont to say), Ed seizes up, encases himself in his earphones and doses himself with opera, turned off from married life and from the progress that Eileen wishes to be the Leary family signature. But move they do, if only to an almost ruinously expensive fixer-upper, which Ed fails to fix up.

At the age of fifty-one he’s diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, a form of removal that dovetails perhaps too neatly with the Bronxville home’s dilapidated state. Meanwhile, between ambitious Mom and decaying Dad, Connell is a cork in the water, a boy unable either to dream wholeheartedly or not at all, who fails to complete his pricey University of Chicago degree (where he never feels at home; seldom has a great city seemed so anonymous as Connell’s Chicago). And one reason this Gen-Xer is not himself is because he has no sense of anything but his own individuality, at least not until Eileen gives him a lecture in what is expected of him as a member of the middle class, whereupon he becomes a teacher like his father.

Broad sweep

A novel that combines a broad temporal sweep with a narrow range of fully developed characters, We Are Not Ourselves is the work of a novelist who is more chronicler than dramatist. The book is heavy on texture, and there are times when Eileen in particular seems to embody the all-American notion of class, namely that you are what you buy.

Some sequences are just too long – yes, life’s like that, but that’s why we need sharp writing. And the style, top-heavy with tender earnestness for the most part, can lurch a bit too readily into the gauche and the lapidary: wallpaper is “installed”; death is “one of life’s singular passages”; phrases like “the imprimatur of purposefulness” are a fairly common speck in the eye.

As to the social and historical contexts, the one time Thomas almost raises his voice is in dealing with pre-Obamacare health provision, but the issue in question is readily disposed of thanks to a deus ex machina in the Mayor's office. That small victory shouldn't be begrudged. But it is a reminder that We Are Not Ourselves is, whatever its faults and virtues, one more variation on the theme that has preoccupied the middle ground of American fiction, in particular, these many years: the private travail of the embattled bourgeoisie, the laughter-free landscapes that they typically inhabit, the distortions of self-consciousness that they go through, of the little triumphs that ease their self-imposed isolation and withdrawal.

Portraits of the corners folks (so called) have painted themselves into are all very worthy and so on, and of course we mustn’t complain. Still, some reckoning of the lives of the new breed of American oligarchs would be worth tackling, too, once in a way. American fiction used to do that very well. It must be that these days the subject is beyond imagining.

George O’Brien is Professor Emeritus of English at Georgetown University, Washington DC