Susie Boyt’s slender, intensely felt seventh novel takes its title from an epigraph that a girl named Lily spots in a London churchyard. The wording makes her laugh – “like the person tried to be loving but the target moved, or the aim was wrong and the love didn’t quite get through”, she explains to her grandmother, Ruth.
That kind of loving abounds here. Husbands and paramours stray, sometimes returning, more often not. Crucially, Ruth’s grown daughter and Lily’s mother, Eleanor, is as good as lost to drug addiction, less a person than a “haunted house” with bad teeth, bad eyes. “The world was Eleanor’s widow,” Ruth thinks to herself.
Proud, sharp and acutely sensitive to the ebb and flow of sentiment, Ruth is a triumph as a narrator. If Boyt’s overuse of the word “bit” (as in “a bit valiant”, “a bit grotesque”, “a bit horrible”) sometimes leaves her sounding arch, then it’s compensated for by Ruth’s flair for sardonic humour. As she comments of some old school friends who pitch up early on with vague – and vaguely dubious – offers of assistance: “I couldn’t see their needing to help me was my problem, quite.”
When it comes to Eleanor – a kind, bright child until she hit her teens – Boyt is able to compress years of drama into a single glance, capturing Eleanor’s vulnerability and withering contempt, and Ruth’s careful maternal longing.
Their smashed-up relationship is counterbalanced by the bond that Ruth and Lily share. Having rescued – pretty much kidnapped, really – her as an infant, Ruth proceeds to raise Lily alone on her part-time teacher’s salary, relying on creativity to make up for her financial limitations. But will Ruth’s faith and devotion be enough – for either of them?
There’s an appealingly retro feel to Boyt’s London backdrop. When a phone rings, for instance, you know it’s a landline, and in this context those old-fashioned concepts such as faith and devotion sidle in unobtrusively. The ending isn’t without brutality, but is hopeful, quietly heroic, humorous even, all without lapsing into earnestness.
Loved and Missed by Susie Boyt is published by Virago (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
