Fiction: How long, I wonder, did it take Douglas Kennedy to write State of the Union? I only ask because, unable to put it down, I read most of it in a single night. Afterwards, somewhat guilt-stricken, I looked at the reviews for his previous novel, A Special Relationship.
"Compulsive," they declared. And "an emotional roller coaster". And - this last from Jonathan Raban, no less - "enthralling and persuasive".
Phew. At least I'm not alone. So take "compulsively readable" and "page-turner" as read, okay? But when it comes to putting Kennedy into a pigeon-hole, forget it. After three outstanding travel books and a brace of manly thrillers, you might expect him to produce a bit of tough-guy crime, or maybe some slice-'em-and-dice-'em forensics. Instead he has taken a kinder, gentler route. Both A Special Relationship and State of the Union focus on relationships within families, and the shifting currents they create from one generation to the next - and both are narrated by women.
A family saga, then? Actually, yes. Kennedy, however, is also concerned with charting the socio-political assumptions that underlie even the most apparently innocuous domestic set-up. The narrator of State of the Union, Hannah Buchan, is the child of 1960s radicals. Her father is a well-known activist, her mother a painter.
Hannah rebels against the rebellion, marries her dull-as-ditchwater boyfriend and, as the wife of the town doctor, buries herself in small-town US life in a dark corner of Maine. In due course she has a moment of madness, which she also buries - or so she thinks - under a giant heap of bourgeois respectablity. Needless to say it comes surging out again, thus providing the page-turning aspect of this beautifully-paced book. Having been raised to take tolerance for granted, Hannah becomes the scapegoat of an edgy and decidedly intolerant post-9/11 US.
Plot apart, the novel's greatest asset is its line-up of formidable characters. The early part of the story is taken up with the drama of Hannah's relationship with her demanding, clever, sarcastic mother - mirrored, in the later pages, by the drama of Hannah's disastrous relationship with her own daughter. There's the sparky Margy, Hannah's best friend - a tough-talking New Yorker - and the rather less appealing Billy, a small-town handyman with a penchant for creeping around in the dark.
And there's Hannah's father. "'Your dad's so cool!' everybody told me at high school the morning after his arrest. Two years later, when I started my freshman year at the University of Vermont, even mentioning that I was Professor Latham's daughter provoked the same response. 'Your dad's so cool!' And I'd nod and smile tightly, and say, 'Yeah, he's the best.'" He is, as the tale progresses, the most interesting of the characters - and his presence gives State of the Union the meditative, wistful undertone that lifts it out of the family saga class and gives it a kind of elegiac intensity.
Where, it seems to ask, did all that colourful counter-culture idealism go? How did the US end up in the grip of joyless fundamentalists? What, for goodness' sake, happened to the flower children? State of the Union is not a perfect book. The sub-plot about Paris is horribly cheesy, the end irritatingly tidy. But by the time you get there, you'll be so sorry the roller coaster ride is over that you won't be inclined to quibble.
State of the Union, By Douglas Kennedy, Hutchinson, 437pp, £14.99
Arminta Wallace is an Irish Times journalist
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