Reading a good book is like coming home, and ultimately home is the main theme of Nina Stibbe’s new novel. In it we revisit her young heroine Lizzie Vogel a few years after we left her at the end of Stibbe’s first novel, the witty and delightful Man at the Helm. As a 10-year-old, Lizzie was looking for a safe space for her mother and siblings; at 15 she is more concerned about the residents and staff of a local care home named Paradise Lodge. Lizzie takes a job there to earn enough money to buy Linco beer shampoo and Maxwell House coffee, becoming an auxiliary nurse whose main duty is helping with the “comfort rounds”.
Books full of older characters have become very popular recently. This isn’t something I can really complain about, and certainly not something I would ever condemn, but they tend to fall into the trap of sentimentality – sweet old ladies and gents with gentle wisdom. The sharp, deadpan descriptions of Lizzie are never saccharine, though, and Stibbe manages to find the right balance, being both funny and touching, brutal and tender. For example, when Lizzie first meets the care home’s male residents her narration heads towards insensitivity, but is saved by her humour and observation, showing us details that restore the characters’ individuality: “They were extremely old – around a hundred, I’d guessed – and it was like being at the aquarium and thinking the amphibians looked like old men (only the other way round). But they were very alive, one of them was reading the Daily Mail and another was fiddling with a transistor radio.”
It’s Lizzie’s voice that makes the book such a joy: warm and sincere, but not too earnest, and knowing without being precocious. I particularly enjoyed her half-wise, half-naive statements. In an interview for a promotion she is asked what she knows about the elderly:
I paused for a while because I was a bit confused and because I had heard something recently that was highly relevant to this question … Then it came to me.
‘Old people are not suited to granary bread,’ I said triumphantly, ‘they dislike it.’
It was worth the wait. [Matron] looked at me wide-eyed, as though I’d surprised and impressed her.
In fact, the whole book surprises and impresses. Lizzie becomes friendly with particular residents as she helps them on and off commodes, letting them into the secrets of her life (skipping school, falling in love), and finding they are as able to astonish her as she is to astonish them. Every character has his or her own charm, from the stoic Mr Simmons, who is repeatedly kidnapped by his stepdaughter, to the tragicomic Matron, who has a horror of ending up in a homeless hostel.
I’m not surprised to see that Stibbe’s writing has been compared to Jane Austen’s, and Paradise Lodge reminds me of a clutch of my favourite books. It deals with the amusement and agony of a teenage girl’s coming of age in a similar way to Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle and Rumer Godden’s The Greengage Summer, it’s as full of clever and witty descriptions of a small community as Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women, and has all the poignancy of Elizabeth Taylor’s Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont.
Towards the end of the book Lizzie has a revelation about what “home” means: “It should be where you’re able to rush in and go to the toilet and flop on the sofa and cry at the horror of the world, or laugh at the silliness of it, and not dread being there.” We all need somewhere like that, and if it can’t be a physical place we can at least find something like it in a book like this.
• Emma Healey’s Elizabeth Is Missing is published by Penguin. To order Paradise Lodge for £10.39 (RRP £12.99) 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.
