KEY POINTS:
I have the dress sense of a bacterium. So why am I reviewing a novel about clothes literal and metaphorical? Because it is by prize-winning, prose-weaving Linda Grant.
It's a story where we do get told that Eunice is wearing box pleats, gilt buttons engraved with fleur-de-lis and a gold Omega watch. That the protagonist Vivien's childhood wardrobe was tweed skirts and ivory-coloured rayon blouses with Peter Pan collars. We hear about "that surge of excitement, that fizz, that deep pleasure" which a new dress can bring.
But Grant also uses clothes as images to link exterior and interior worlds, as paradigms of the disguises that everyone wears. This is a novel about identity - denied, revealed, covered up, relabelled, stripped away. Identity that warms or shames, delights or almost destroys.
Vivien's parents are Hungarian refugees, who come to London in the 1930s and build a new, safe existence by living as invisibly and mouse-like as they can. Her father is too scared even to leave work early on the day his daughter is born.
Then into their claustrophobic lives erupts Uncle Sandor of the electric-blue mohair suit, black suede shoes, diamond rings, and tarty girlfriend with plastic crocodile handbag. Vivien's timid father greets him with spitting rage, and suddenly the world changes.
For Vivien herself, it changes via fashion, literature and sex. The last begins with Gilbert the cartoonist, moves on to Alexander the biochemistry student (until the ghastly second night of their honeymoon), progresses/regresses to Claude of British Rail and leather jackets. Later there is even the odd happy encounter.
The plot steps backwards and forwards across decades, with dance-halls, skinheads, dank tenements, freaky after-dark '70s London, lice and brutality in a WWII labour camp.
Extravagant, protean Uncle Sandor (Grant modelled him on rack-landlord and thug Peter Rachman) begins to fill Vivien's world. Gangster, racist, survivor, victim, pimp, philanthropist: he is always complex, always morally ambivalent.
There are a few lurid and florid bits; a climax of betrayal, blood and burial; a risk-taking penultimate chapter. And there is a stoicism, a qualified resignation and reconciliation as Vivien in late middle-age returns to the unfinished business of her youth. All contribute to the novel's gravity and texture.
Grant likes to follow a book of fiction with one of non-fiction. Her next will be a semi-autobiographical one about the meanings of what we choose to wear. I may learn a bit. I'm sure I'll enjoy a lot.
The Clothes on Their Backs
By Linda Grant (Little, Brown $38.99)
