Rose Tremain has always been drawn to outsiders in her fiction, perhaps most notably in The Road Home, her Orange prizewinning novel about Lev, an eastern European migrant worker struggling to adapt to life in England. Curiously, in that novel, Tremain went to some lengths to establish a parallel between Lev and Hamlet, the prevaricating Prince of Denmark. It seemed an odd comparison to make, since Lev’s isolation is explicitly geographic and cultural, driven by economic desperation, while Hamlet’s is composed of existential anguish about family, love and death. Hamlet is the lone insider, at the centre of things but exiled by his own anxieties. The parallel is much more easily made with some of the characters in this new collection of short stories. Tremain’s protagonists are often loners whose isolation is emotional rather than physical, who are trapped by memory, desire, or loyalty in situations they can no longer control.
The heroine of the title story, for instance, can’t free herself from the overpowering influence of her American lover, even after he casually abandons her, and leaves her to cope with an abortion on her own. In the 1960s, Beth was swept off her feet by Thaddeus, a photographer, who took her to Paris and shared his taste for slightly kinky sex. When he disappears, Beth relives the affair in fictional form, The American Lover being the title of the novel that makes her briefly rich and famous. Despite the mistreatment, the affair with Thaddeus persists in imagined glimpses and dreams, and promises to outlive any other form of love for her. As a story of obsession, it seems very much to belong to the era it describes, when the new freedoms aroused as much uncertainty as they did pleasure, and when a nihilistic yearning seemed always to underpin hedonistic pursuits. If it was a film it would be directed by Antonioni, in black and white.
Similarly, the main character in the subsequent story, “Captive”, finds himself an exile in his own kingdom. Owen Gibb lives alone in a bungalow on the farm where he grew up, which is now occupied by strangers who turn the rest of the farm into holiday homes. Owen deals with his isolation by founding a community of his own, constructing a set of boarding kennels to house the temporarily abandoned dogs of holidaying pet owners. “He realised that the casting off of animals was all part of the human condition, a longing to be rid of the things you’d thought you might be able to love, and found you couldn’t.” This kingdom within a kingdom sets him in opposition to the new farm owners, and a grim battle ensues. When his heating oil is stolen during freezing weather, Owen must either watch his new companions suffer in the snow – or let them into his house. This is a finely judged, tightly wound piece of writing, capturing the essence of isolation and loneliness.
While another shorter piece, about an elderly widower who struggles to keep a neglected piece of lane clear of litter, has a similar poignancy and power, on the whole Tremain’s characters benefit from being placed on a larger stage, and in more august surroundings. The title story’s trio of locales reads like the tag below the name of a modish couturier (London, Paris, Los Angeles), and fashionable west London is the favoured setting for many of the stories. Or else they engage with literary history, as in “The Jester of Astapovo”, which dramatises the chaos of Leo Tolstoy’s final hours, when he took flight from his wife, the formidable Countess Sophie, and ended up at a train station in a remote corner of Russia. The stationmaster of Astapovo, in whose modest abode Tolstoy spends his dying hours, reflects on the situation with his own wife and mistress. The story deftly constructs a web of interlinking tensions and concerns, which turn on the shock of the great man and his world fitting into a humble stationmaster’s shack. “History itself had come to them and taken up residence with them for a while and was now abandoning them.”
An overbearing family provides a dynamic for another of the more successful stories, though this time it is the child who drives the parents away. Walter and Lena Parker find it all too much when their grown-up daughter returns to their Nashville home with rowdy musicians and dodgy lovers in tow. They move permanently into their lakeside holiday cabin to find some peace, and try to kid themselves that they are happy there. The restricted territory and exile of old age is a recurring theme. “When you get old,” says Walter, “all you want is a small bit of ground, so you don’t have to see too far down any particular road.” But restriction is imposed, the exile enforced.
The story that most forcefully deals with the idea that we live within the boundaries of how others see us is “The Housekeeper”, in which a young woman is horrified to discover, after a brief sexual encounter with Daphne du Maurier, that she is the model for Mrs Danvers in Rebecca, “who is ugly and diseased with jealousy and wears her dark hair piled upon her head … ” The contrast with how she had thought she might be represented – as “Danni who had been loving and tender” – could hardly be greater. We feel for the betrayal of Danni, as we feel for all of the characters in this powerful, involving, wide-ranging collection.
• Gerard Woodward’s most recent novel is Vanishing (Picador). To order The American Lover for £12.99 (RRP £16.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846.
