Redemption value

This bitingly funny and fiercely observed new novel, which won Britain's Hawthornden Prize and the South African Sunday Times Literary Award, is reviewed by Tony Eprile

The Promise of Happiness by Justin Cartwright

Thomas Dunne Books / St Martin's Press, €20

Justin Cartwright is frequently mentioned alongside authors like Ian McEwan, Martin Amis and Kazuo Ishiguro. The Promise of Happiness is a sharp-eyed portrait of a contemporary English family whose members are each unhappy in his or her own way. The linchpin of the family is Juliet Judd (Ju-Ju), who is just being released from an American prison after serving two years for fencing a Tiffany window.

Ju-Ju had been the blessed, prodigal daughter who had gone from Oxford to the Courtauld Institute of Art and then on to wealth, fame and the Upper East Side after publishing the definitive book on Tiffany windows.

She had believed in art as evidence of human striving for the impossible, sharing Malraux's view of art as a revolt against destiny.

"But somehow fate got me by the throat anyway", she says. Art was no help. The courtroom scenes, recounted in flashback, are written as comic theatre, complete with a humorous career criminal straight out of Goodfellas whose testimony cast Ju-Ju in the role of an upper-crust mastermind who thinks herself above the law, a sort of Martha Stewart of the art world, though there is some doubt whether any actual theft took place. But the shocking violation Ju-Ju experienced in prison (mostly shown offstage) is moving and disturbing, the one aspect of the story that Cartwright wisely recognises cannot be treated with gentle British irony.

There is an old-fashioned Christian morality play half hidden beneath this witty family saga, for each of the Judds can be seen as worshipping false gods and being punished accordingly.

Charles, the once suave and debonair paterfamilias, has lost his high-level accounting job in a corporate merger, his reinstatement lawsuit failing because of his excessive fondness for young trainees and secretaries, and now he is unmanned and increasingly unmoored.

He has a tendency to speak his thoughts out loud, interjecting his rude opinions of others' silly prattle about investments and parties. His wife, Daphne, has given herself to domesticity, making a hilarious mess out of the celebrity chef Rick Stein's recipes for mackerel, which in her version comes to look like a swab from an operating theatre. Twenty-eight-year-old Charlie is decent and solid and is about to be very rich from his online clothing company, sock-it-to-me.com, which sells throwaway socks for businessmen.

But he doesn't love Ana, the South American beauty he's about to marry. She has the air of an extravagantly healthy animal, like one of those racehorses you see at Ascot, and is carrying his child and he is repelled by her taste for extravagantly expensive clothes. Sophie, the youngest, is caught up in sex, drugs and advertising, where her job includes supplying cocaine to visiting Italian clients who consider the sleazy, married middle-aged boss with whom she has been having a tired affair to be a genius because he can make the image of a dolphin morph into an Alfa Romeo.

The elder Judds have retired to Trebetherick in Cornwall, where the former poet laureate Sir John Betjeman is buried. Betjeman – Britain's most popular 20th-century poet – his work is filled with nostalgia for Englishness while gently poking fun at a nation that stands for Books from Boots and country lanes; free speech, free passes, class distinction; Democracy and proper drains. Irascible and slightly bonkers, with his once lush Ted Hughes hair now limp and the colour of what's in a cuspidor, Charles habitually walks the route immortalised in Betjeman's Trebetherick. The pressure of his aging prostate coincides with his arrival at the churchyard, and watering the best-selling poet's grave has become part of his ritual.

Daphne has found purpose in flower arranging for St Enodoc, the church celebrated in the poets work, and in her conversations with the beardy vicar. A pale form of belief is quietly seeping into her soul, even though she recognises that for many the church has very little to do with God. Instead, it's more a shrine to Englishness: flowers, history, familiar if meaningless hymns. Daphne insists that Charlie and Ana get married at St Enodoc, throwing herself into planning an extravagant flower arrangement, with garlands covering the arch where the bridal couple will enter the church and more flowers to welcome the best man, who is also his sister, the prodigal daughter. "The flowers, their lavishness and beauty, are our family statement... Of redemption." It is significant that the supposedly stolen Tiffany window and the stained glass windows at St Enodoc portray the resurrection.

Although the humour is sharper-edged, the novel follows Betjeman in both extolling and mocking the values, virtues and pleasures of the English: dogs, gardening, pubs, beautiful old churches by the coast and the belief instilled in Charles by school, postwar dreariness, and by his father that drudgery was noble, since it was necessary for country and family. However much the plot twists upend this last notion, the novel moves toward the restoration of some lost sense of rightness. With a few minor lapses (the American dialogue reads like an Englishman's journal of odd phrases and lame mispronunciations, like "Yurp" for Europe), Cartwright's novel is wonderfully well-written. The savage irony and probing moral questioning nicely balance each other out, and as an exploration of contemporary Englishness proud, ironic and ridiculous all at once it is unsurpassed.

©The New York Times