THE USUAL DESIRE TO KILL, by Camilla Barnes
The usual desire to kill your exasperating old parents — that’s the implied full title of Camilla Barnes’s wickedly delightful debut novel.
Narrated by their middle-aged daughter Miranda, with various epistolary and dramatically scripted passages interspersed, the book chronicles a few months in the lives of a 70-something British couple. They bicker and garden and suffer each other’s considerable deafness, minor dementia and timeworn personalities in a vine-encrusted, bat-infested stone house in rural France.
Ducks and chickens abound — also house cats and stray cats and a pair of llamas that sometimes wander into the kitchen. Family secrets emerge, but the plot mostly revolves around the scheduling of a hip replacement. I loved it completely.
Our guide, Miranda, visits often from Paris, where she works in the theater and is currently acting in her own adaptation of “King Lear.” Resonances with the play are lightly drawn and very pleasurable: She and her older sister, Charlotte, when they’re not trading emails about the “various ghastlinesses” of their parents’ house, argue about who is the favored daughter; their father, a philosopher, is prone to some mild raving — as is everybody else, honestly.
When Miranda invites him to her play, he laments that he won’t be able to hear, but at least he’ll see it, so long as nobody gouges out his eyes beforehand. “The eye gouging was one of my favorite bits of ‘Lear,’” Miranda explains, “and I gleefully shouted, ‘Out, vile Jelly! Where is thy luster now?’” (I texted this passage to my own deafish dad, who responded, apropos of not that, “Mom beat me at Scrabble yesterday by 100 points.”)
There’s no third daughter, but there is an imaginary son, James — their mother’s favorite child — and Miranda’s own 19-year-old daughter, Alice, who doesn’t take kindly to the remains of lunch being casually tossed into the back seat of a car. “She gave me a look in the mirror that I interpreted as meaning ‘Don’t you know that producing one ton of foil creates four tons of toxic waste?’” Perfection.
The parents are survivors of going without and act like it, donning a kind of eternal postwar gloom that seems to have become them. The freezer is full of gruesome gray food from a bygone decade; wine is drunk by the lukewarm boxful; eggs are numbered, literally, with a marker; rationing is in their very bones — their very cold bones, because they will never turn on the heat.
Miranda, confessing to a bit of eye trouble, is given a peeling tube of ophthalmic ointment that turns out to have belonged to Cornelius, a long-dead cat. Afterward, the rusty old biscuit tin called “the medicine cabinet” is returned to a cupboard under the stairs alongside such other relics as “a box of old syringes once prescribed for a boil on Dad’s leg.”
The hoarding and dilapidation, so deliciously cataloged, are easily enough explained. But some things are mysterious to the grown kids, at least slightly, like the parents’ difficult personalities and fractious marriage. Why is their mother so distant? Why is their father so cowed? As Miranda puts it: “Your parents are your parents: you don’t question what you have for dinner, or where you live, or how they talk to you; that is just the way things are. It’s when you’re older that you start to think, ‘Hey, that was a bit odd, wasn’t it?’”
Explanations are gently extended — if not to the daughters, then at least, via the mother’s old letters to a person named Kitty and the father’s confessions to his granddaughter, to us. A shroudedly unpleasant incident, referred to as “The Incident,” is first evoked on Page 59 and uncovered by the book’s end. As is the usual way — in Shakespeare and in life — grief and misunderstanding are to blame, and these are delicately rendered.
Mostly, though, “The Usual Desire to Kill” is about how aggravating it is that even one’s own parents and children are so other. To wit: “She slopped across the tiled floor making a sound very similar to her grandfather. Was there anything more annoying, I wondered, than the sound of someone else walking in slippers?” The book implicitly questions Lear’s famous assertion that nothing will come of nothing: There’s not much here, but it is everything.
Or, as Miranda herself puts it, “It has to be said, they may be barking mad, but I always come home with some good anecdotes.”
THE USUAL DESIRE TO KILL | By Camilla Barnes | Scribner | 256 pp. | $27.99
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