Set in the wealthy enclave of Belle Haven, Connecticut, in 1996, Somebody Down There Likes Me is a brilliantly cutting novel of the rich at their worst. The Gulch family are “beyond stinking rich but riddled with sickness”.
At the head of the business empire is Honey, “widely considered the most gifted business mind of her generation”, but with an unfortunate tendency to ignore the difference between money-making of a criminal nature and that achieved through legal enterprise. Business is her forté, not motherhood, but “in a moment of rare distraction, it turned out that conception came easy”.
Nominally at her side is her husband Fax, the supposed frontman of the business, the shaker of hands, the maker of speeches. But the reality of life has become too difficult for Fax to absorb and has driven him into a drug-addled fantasy world. He now values “the great people and notions of the past and the certainty they offered”. In his elaborate archive rooms are examples of historical records and objects based around characters as diverse as Ted Kennedy, Winston Churchill, William Blake, Truman Capote and Ernest Hemingway. Being immersed in these “realities” gives Fax respite from the darkening world his wife has led them into.
As the Gulch business empire heads for collapse and the FBI moves ever closer, it is time to call the family together and for the machinations of self-survival to begin. Daughter Kick reluctantly heads home after a decade away from her dysfunctional family. As a young adult, she had turned her back on the kind of wealth that “makes a person entirely free” but “completely captive”. She has, however, struggled to achieve self-satisfaction “off in the world, being angry without action”, and so perceives herself as no better than the family she left behind. In a corner of her childhood memories emerges the parallel story of Mouse, her school friend who disappeared under suspicious circumstances.
Kick’s brother Lincoln revels in the family riches and the benefits he gains from them. As Fax lives in the past, Lincoln lives for the future, one in which “the internet will bring Freedom and Peace to degrees thought impossible”. He is headed for The Valley and will use and abuse anything in his way, a youthful mirror to his mother’s cutthroat endeavours.
Structurally, the book is broken into nine consecutive days within which our four family (a loose term) members take turns to explain, excuse, blame and justify their attitudes to one another and life in general. Tellingly, the children talk in the first person while Honey and Fax are written in the third. Much philosophising takes place as the expected denouement looms closer. “There are clear lines of sight to our destiny”, and that may be true but a little manipulation of that destiny can change the future. “There is a point where you give up on reality and you recalibrate what you expect of the world” – it is a race to the bottom and we find ourselves hoping for a seed of redemption.
Robert Lukins is a well-regarded Australian author of two previous novels, Loveland and Everlasting Sunday. Both were shortlisted for respected prizes across the Tasman. In expanding the lives of four very different characters in this story, he has shown great skill in differentiating the diversity of their ages, gender and attitudes. They might be “merely seeds cast across the soil of [their] situation” but they are also “part of the problem of life, like everyone else”, and we can but hope that life itself can rise above the greed of wealth. Clever, witty, humorous and thought-provoking.
Somebody Down There Likes Me, by Robert Lukins (Allen & Unwin, $36.99), is out now.
