Earlier this year Fay Weldon published a piece in the New York Times entitled “Writer of a Certain Age”. Lamenting the obsession with youth in contemporary culture, the novelist ruefully asserted that a female writer “in her 50s and interested in depicting the sexual and social predicaments of women her age … will find it hard to get a publisher”. So catastrophically uncommercial is a mature protagonist, Weldon contested, that the writer’s agent would immediately insist on her age being “taken down 20, even 30 years”.
Little wonder, then, that the publishers of In My House have taken pains to draw comparisons with Zoe Heller’s Notes on a Scandal, a bestselling novel that unequivocally bucked Weldon’s trend. Like Barbara, Heller’s antiheroine, the protagonist of Alex Hourston’s debut is a woman in her late 50s. And like Barbara, Maggie is single and living alone when she develops an unlikely friendship with a much younger woman.
There, however, the similarities end. Perhaps the reason spinsters don’t sell is that they are too often (type)cast in the Barbara mould, warped by loneliness and lack of love, surviving, as Heller put it, “on a crumb of anticipation for weeks at a time, but always in danger of crushing the waited-for event with the freight of my excessive hope”.
Maggie Benson is a different prospect altogether. Divorced, estranged from her grown-up daughter, she is a woman of intense, even violent, emotions which she has, for the most part, learned to control. “There was an itch sewn into me,” she observes at one point, “though I’ve long since cut it out.” She is still impatient, intolerant, quick to judge. Her caustic observations illuminate her ordinary surroundings: the “long, queeny sigh” of London buses, the woman in the Oxfam shop “dressed in discontinued shades”, the “bosomy embrace” of the suburbs that “made me want to bite”. She has a tendency to drink too much.
As for her solitude, she protects it fiercely. She works from home. Her friends are fellow dog walkers who meet in the park according to an unspoken schedule; her holidays walking tours taken in anonymous groups. When one of the walkers insists on setting her up on Facebook she quickly deletes the incoming messages. “The overtures and suggestions – so-and-so wants to be friends – the vernacular of a pushy child … The intimacy of it gave me the shivers.”
It is on her return from one of these walking holidays that Maggie, queueing for the toilets at Gatwick airport, notices a young woman waiting behind her. The woman is obviously afraid. When she catches Maggie’s eye in the mirror, she mouths a single word: Help. The scene is set for an edge-of-your-seat thriller, except that the thriller never materialises. Maggie accompanies the woman through customs and hands her over to the airport police. Matters are handled. The Albanian trafficker is arrested. The press show a brief flicker of interest but, despite the attempts of a pushy journalist, the story is quickly forgotten.
Maggie’s life, it seems, will continue as before, until a victim liaison officer pays her a visit. She tells Maggie that the woman, Anja, has asked if she can get in touch. She wants to say thank you. Another story seems to beckon, the vulnerable woman exploited by shady confidence tricksters, but yet again the novel defies expectation. The story that follows is Maggie’s story, her past peeled back, her secrets laid bare as little by little Anja insinuates herself into the older woman’s life.
Involving and original, In My House is a book about betrayal and guilt; the smallness of our sins and the shattering enormity of their consequences. It is about the impossibility of walling ourselves off from human love, however determined the attempt. Hourston resolutely avoids the predictable, skilfully throwing the reader off-balance and creating a compelling sense of unease that shimmers unsettlingly beneath the ordinary lives she explores.
The novel is not perfect. Hourston’s characters have an infuriating habit of speaking with the sentences broken. In the middle. Because. That’s how people talk. The tic is distracting, breaking the flow and the tension. Her unsatisfyingly tidy ending also disappoints, its pat reconciliations undermining a story whose power has lain in its complexity and ambivalence.
But despite these flaws, In My House remains a strikingly promising debut. Caustically perceptive, wryly funny, occasionally devastatingly tender, Maggie Benson is a terrific protagonist; like all the most satisfactory characters in fiction, she is both infuriatingly contradictory and entirely plausible. It is good news for us that, despite Weldon’s warnings, Hourston’s publishers plainly thought so too.
• Clare Clark’s We That Are Left is published by Harvill Secker. To order In My House for £14.99 (RRP £11.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
