When Sagesse LaBasse, the daughter of an American mother and French Algerian father, sets out to tell her story, she prefaces it with a remark which could be taken as a warning: "I am an American now, but this wasn't always so . . . I'm not an American by default. It's a choice. But it is a mask". Claire Messud's second novel more than confirms the promise of her debut, When the World Was Steady (1994). That said, this is not a comfortably engaging tale about a remote young girl's rite of passage - the themes are those of a family history caught, and at times created, by national history, while various forms of deception and domestic tensions also dictate events.
As a novelist, Messud is too relentlessly intelligent to content herself with a narrative left to unfold through story alone, and at times this intelligence puts a strain - and not only on the reader, who may be disconcerted by the shifts of tone and passages of intense philosophical inner debate. It also tends to place our narrator - at times aloof, at others rebellious, and even, occasionally, vulnerable - suddenly at a distance, just when we had begun to like her. There is also the question, of course, of exactly how intelligent, or even human, Messud wants her narrator to be. Perhaps the book should have been written through the third person? While this novel has many fine qualities, is readable and narratively compelling, it is difficult to shake off the feeling that it has been slowly and laboriously executed. For a book told by a narrator returning to her teenage world, there is little spontaneity, lightness or even wistfulness on offer - Sagesse is disciplined, marked for life - and this ultimately proves more burden than advantage to what is a sombre, introspective and ambitious, if frequently atmospheric, novel. Sagesse appears to have arrived at the present by virtue of having torn through many layers of her family past. She is also now at a remove, which is physical as well as mental, living in New York in "an ill-lit huddle of books and objects". Now her older self wants "to translate the world inside, beginning with the home that was once mine". This brings her, and the narrator, back to the life she once had, living in the South of France where her grandfather had built a hotel. At first the scene appears set for fun. Sagesse is one of a group of lazy young teenagers preparing to exchange playing in the sun for flirting. Her grandfather's Bellevue Hotel acts as a centre of sorts, not only for its place in the family's story and because Sagesse's volatile father also works there, but because the pool acts as a magnet for herself and her friends - so much so that the kids have become a nuisance and have taken to increasingly daring poolside games, such as bathing naked by moonlight. Exasperated by their refusal to heed his objections, Sagesse's grandfather takes out his shotgun, wounding one of the children in the process. The injuries are minor but there is a court case and obvious public disgrace.
Well before this happens, Sagesse already has much to tell. Her parents are caught in a war of attrition and her mother's life is further complicated by her efforts to become French, while obviously remaining an outsider. She is a tense, nervy and disappointed individual, yet she also proves useful when interpreting the various versions of her husband's chaotic family history for her daughter. Sagesse also has a brother, Etienne, who has been severely mentally and physically handicapped from birth. Her speculative description of his birth is not only chillingly well-written, it also provides us with an uneasy insight into a narrator who is capable of immense coldness, remarking of her brother that"he was - he is - my limitation . . . My parents rose to their fate with Catholic dignity, against the advice of many - including, I was eventually to learn, their priest. We kept him and loved him, or tried to". . . It is as if Messud is determined to maintain a distance between her narrator and the reader.
Sagesse's narrative voice is deliberate and formal, and although this could be seen as a device to present her as being suspended between two languages, she does have an American mother, and by the time she chooses to tell the story, has spent many years in the US.
The tensions in the family preoccupy Sagesse, and her father's treatment of her mother outrages her, but she also has her own problems. Interestingly enough, these seem quite minor, even to her. As the narrative progresses, so do the long sequences of family history which are impassively, almost impersonally, recounted. The hotel becomes a Jamesian symbol for many things. Although Sagesse is a deadpan character, the flatness of these self-contained passages lend an artificiality to the story. Elsewhere, however, through the sharpness of the characterisation of the haughty grandmother and the willing American daughter-in-law, Messud achieves a palpable sense of an uneasy relationship. Also impressive is the gradual development of the narrator's understanding of her father's strange, tormented personality and growing sympathy for her broken grandfather.
Considering the overwhelmingly intellectual and introspective nature of her approach to memory and the layers of family history and myth, particularly where harsh realities may be concealed in more acceptable lies, Messud is not at ease with dialogue. The Last Life rarely pulls free of Sagesse's inner world, except when she is sent on a short holiday to the US and becomes part of her Aunt's carefully run household. Both in style and content, it is a novel caught between Europe and the US. Sagesse's cultural confusion is even further complicated by her family's Algerian past. As with life, the narrative moves back and forth, Sagesse's observations sustaining the sense of discovery. Messud has written a considerable novel, elegant and compelling, on an architectural scale. It engages through its realism, sheer force of story and obvious deference to Henry James, all of which are sufficiently convincing to counter the technical shortcomings.
Eileen Battersby is a critic and Irish Times journalist
