There’s no one who can get on our nerves like family can. This is certainly the case with Miranda’s family in Camilla Barnes’s entertaining and layered new novel, The Usual Desire to Kill. Almost everything about Miranda’s parents drives her nuts. Her mother is a terrible communicator who constantly blames others for not doing things she forgot she didn’t actually tell them and insists on having things done her own way. Her father turns off his hearing aid so that he can ignore everyone when he wants to. Both parents engage in petty revenge and generally bring out the worst in each other. And, in spite of this and more, Miranda dutifully travels from Paris to her parents’ rural home every weekend.
I finished The Usual Desire to Kill in a single day because I was hooked on the chaos. Most of the story centers on Miranda as she and her sister try to help their parents navigate their increasingly poor health. Both of them have grown up “managing” their parents and have no little resentment about that. Their father, Peter, struggles with the illogic of people, which leads him to struggle with his anger. Plus, there’s the Incident. Miranda’s sister, Charlotte, is obsessed with finding out what Peter may or may not have done to a family friend years ago and which her parents absolutely refuse to discuss. Meanwhile, Miranda and Charlotte’s mother needs to have a second hip replacement and she’s the sort of person who needs to be cajoled and/or tricked into going to the hospital. Barnes relates all of this either through Miranda or Miranda and Charlotte’s emails to each other. The impression I got was of four people who have learned to function through triangulation, deliberate ignorance about things they’re not supposed to know, and carefully maneuvering around the parents’ feelings.
Further complicating this family portrait are letters from Miranda and Charlotte’s mother (never actually named) to her sister, Kitty, in the 1960s. “Mum” is a young woman living away from home for the first time, studying at university, when she meets two men. One of them, a sort of family friend from America, is attractive and interesting. The other is Peter, a philosophy student who instantly had me wondering if they were on the spectrum. It’s hard to believe that the hapless Peter and “Mum” will marry and have a family. These letters reveal a lot about “Mum” that explains her prickliness, things that even the most determined interrogator would never be able to get out of her because it just wouldn’t do to talk about a strict, uncaring mother or a surprise pregnancy or constant, casual sexism.
The only person in the family who isn’t constantly seething or fretting is Miranda’s daughter, Alice. Alice is the only person in the novel who seems to accept everyone just the way they are. It’s also through Alice and her relationship with her grandfather, Peter, that Barnes plays with some of the elements of King Lear to make us further contemplate what we inherit (literally and figuratively) from our ancestors.
Readers who enjoy complicated family stories will find much to enjoy in this layered and often funny novel.
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.