In Luke Kennard’s second novel, The Answer to Everything, the details of his fictional world begin to clarify. Kennard’s first novel, The Transition, coalesced around the slow reveal of a portrait of mental illness under the surface of an apparent dystopia. Here, Kennard pulls a similar trick, turning his readers away from the emotional heart of his work until very late in its unfolding, a revelation that carries a powerful emotional charge when it finally pays off.
Kennard writes about the middle class. Flat whites, home ownership, therapists, teachers – this is his territory, and he subverts and skewers the place where so many of us live with Ballardian flair. The Answer to Everything is essentially the story of an affair that develops when Emily, Steven and their two sons move in opposite Elliott, Alathea and their two sons in Criterion Gardens, a 90s housing estate repurposed as a kind of social project – communal allotment, a pool of “eco cars” with charging pods available to borrow.
Strangely enough for a novel that spans more than 400 pages, there is not much more to say about the plot. Emily, the novel’s protagonist, grapples with her latent faith, her emotionally absent husband, her growing infatuation with Elliott, the exhaustion of raising her young family and her guilty friendship with Alathea. There’s an illicit day trip, some drinks, some dinners; but the book offers little in terms of narrative movement. What it provides instead is an absorbing deep dive into the world of this affair (which turns out, as the story unfolds, not to be what it initially seems). The novel is studded with WhatsApp conversations, which are hugely effective in immersing the reader in the flirtation that takes Emily over; the book’s rhythm and propulsion comes from the interplay of these sequences with scenes of childcare and household management. This feels slightly schematic and episodic at times, and can’t quite cover over a pervading sense of stasis; but that stasis, to an extent, is the point. Life, for all Kennard’s characters, is turning out to be a disappointment that borders at times on the unbearable. Only when they are messaging do these people come alive.
As a playwright-novelist myself, I’ve always been distrustful of critics who use writers’ dual careers as a means of analysing their work. “A playwright’s ear for dialogue” is one of my most hated phrases. Kennard’s character Elliott describes reviewers as flatterers who belong in the eighth grade of hell, so I’ll risk his ire by confessing that, for the first time in my reading life, I found validity in this kind of analysis-by-simile. Kennard, also a poet, has a poet’s flair for noticing the electric in the quotidian. There are arias in this novel about depression and coffee shops, watching children play and feeling you’re still one of them, choosing to listen to the music of childhood and the tension and magic of texting that genuinely raise the pulse. These flashes of insight lift the novel’s even and ironical prose, so that that it feels a little like a gathered poetry collection as well as a story in itself.
So much about this novel is highly successful, but many readers will still, I suspect, struggle to engage with it, because it is a story about unlikable people doing selfish things and feeling very little guilt or remorse. Kennard is not unaware of this; his characters eat in Michelin-starred restaurants while abhorring skiing because it represents everything they think they are against – “rich people falling down a mountain and calling it a sport”. They say things like: “I’m trying to get better at interrogating my own privilege.” But this, of course, is what a great many people are like. Interrogating these lives is essential to understanding the way we live now. The book, therefore, demands respect as a highly accomplished essay in wry and clear-sighted self-satire by a member of the cultured middle class, even if, as a succession of images of frustration and selfishness, its effect is undoubtedly alienating.
• Barney Norris’s latest novel is The Vanishing Hours (Black Swan). The Answer to Everything is published by 4th Estate (£14.99). To support the Guardian order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
