EASY PEASY
By Lesley Glaister
St. Martin’s, 245 pages, $20.95
The characters of Lesley Glaister’s seventh novel suffer so many various privations–of dignity, respect, fidelity, health and trust–that it is remarkable how compellingly their story unfolds. Perhaps, in fact, Glaister’s skill at making the brutalities of human nature feel as ordinary as they often are is the very reason her work has failed to attract a strong American following. (In Glaister’s native England, her first novel, “Honour Thy Father,” won a Somerset Maugham award.)
“Easy Peasy,” composed with chilling economy and a cunning structure, is the memoir of a woman whose father’s suicide pulls her back to an emotionally stunted childhood. It opens when Griselda Dawkins hears the news about her father on an evening she is certain her lover was about to end their relationship. The lover, Foxy, is a stylish older woman who met Griselda by patronizing her vintage-clothing shop and has become a kind of sexual surrogate mother to her companion. Conscious of her dependence on Foxy’s reciprocal devotion, Griselda must look with as much dread into the future of this relationship as she does into her family’s past.
Goaded by the dark hindsight of insomnia (a chronic state from which she tells most of her story), Griselda begins to re-examine what little she knows about Ralph Dawkins, the man whose silent anger tyrannized his family’s otherwise run-of-the-mill, middle-class life. Only after dark would his demons emerge, as keening nightmares that Griselda overheard in secret, solitary fear. She knows her father’s torment must have been rooted in his years as a POW in Burma; she’s also fairly certain he never spoke of that experience, not even to his wife. Just before his death, however, Griselda’s mother gave her a package sent by the widow of a man who was imprisoned with Ralph–a package that Ralph’s wife was afraid to give him. Opening it now, Griselda finds the remains of a meticulous diary her father kept in Burma (why only smudged fragments survive is a squalid jest-of-fate detail that magnifies the miseries recorded in the diary).
Brilliantly, in that they mirror what Ralph’s mind must have conjured during the “safe” suburban nights in years to come, the fragments Griselda deciphers are very much the stuff of nightmares: never wholly graspable yet matter-of-factly gruesome. There is, of course, a tantalizing reference–to a man named Vince–that Griselda seizes on as the key to her father’s psyche, a mystery she becomes obsessed with solving.
Like all the best narrators, Griselda invokes as much irritation as she does compassion. As a lover, she is brittle and jealous; as a daughter and sister, secretive and critical. How these qualities evolved in her she reveals largely through memories of the few years her family spent at a house called The Nook, when she and her older sister, Hazel, were on the cusp of adolescence. The sisters spent much of their time together there in a treehouse, a sanctuary that looked into the home of poorer neighbors, a docile deaf boy named Vassily Pudilchuk (Puddle-duck to his ruthless schoolmates) and his mother, an affectionate prostitute named Wanda.
When Vassily begins to hang around the Dawkins home, Hazel insists that Griselda find a way to get rid of him. The younger girl asks how, and Hazel answers, ” `Easy peasy Japanesy. . . . Don’t be pathetic. . . . Just do it.’ ” That Griselda will comply is a foregone conclusion. From this moment, the novel’s already eerie suspense gathers a vicious momentum, for the reader can justifiably anticipate many unsavory revelations (some of which you will guess–but not all).
There’s nothing new about a novel that excavates family dysfunction through the eyes of a grown child, but Glaister’s knack for capturing essential details–the unbearably hapless cruelty of children; the vindictive edge to loneliness; the consolation of dying–makes this one stand out. Her rendering of Griselda’s insomnia (the legacy of Ralph’s nightmares) is particularly sharp: “Night-time” she reflects early on, “is like a lake that must be swum, a vast, deep, black lake. For the first few hours there’s still the light behind you from the shore you’ve left, drifting music or voices perhaps, still the comfort of other presences. And later towards dawn, there’s the sense of a community ahead, lights flicking on, radios, early buses trundling along the shore. But in between there is the cold swallowing dark in which you can be lost, in which either shore is too hopelessly far behind, too far ahead.”
Spiritual bleakness in its infinite variety preoccupies Glaister, but her capacity for writing about despair with such moving understatement always keeps the reader from turning away.
The only false note in this book is, perhaps, Griselda’s achievement of the ultimate “shore” she seeks–a rush to forgiveness that seems facile for someone so complex. This flaw, however, is of little consequence. “Easy Peasy” is, all told, an acutely sad and harsh but empathetic account of human cruelties and the power of their vindication, no matter how rare. For the strength and beauty of its writing alone, one can only hope it will bring Lesley Glaister the wider recognition she deserves.
