If there’s one group of professionals more indebted to the unhappy family than psychiatrists, it’s novelists. In the case of the Siskins,the clan at the heart of Hannah Beckerman’s resolutely heartbreaking second novel, familial dysfunction has long since ossified into estrangement. Yet in a complex, cruel twist, their acrimony will turn out to flow from the very lifeblood of every happy family’s tale: love.
Jess and Lily are chalk-and-cheese sisters, one an artsy single mum struggling to meet her mortgage repayments, the other a high-powered ceiling-smasher whose life resembles a sleek photo-shoot. Though their west London homes are just three miles apart and their daughters the same age, it’s been 15 years since they last saw one another and nearly three decades since they’ve properly spoken. But now their mother, Audrey, is gravely ill; with just months to live, she is desperate to see her girls reconciled.
Though romance sparks and infidelity combusts on these pages, this is a very grownup novel, its focus firmly on platonic familial bonds that, as Beckerman shows, can have infinitely more devastating effects than anything Cupid might tie. It’s a very female novel, too, without any of the twee cosiness that description so often connotes. Switching between its trio of distinct viewpoints, the narrative toggles back and forth in time, compelling each woman in turn to re-examine her memories of the moment when things went so wrong for their family, in the summer of 1988.
Meanwhile, melding her peace-making mission with a bucket list inspired by a diary entry written on her 16th birthday, Audrey takes up life drawing, joins a choir and jets off to New York. That might make If Only I Could Tell You sound breezy – it’s not. Having set the clock ticking, journalist and critic Beckerman moves the narrative along at a determined pace, tapping pop-culture references for flashback atmosphere (think Rick Astley, Grange Hill and Wagon Wheels) and eschewing overly fussy imagery in favour of clipped precision. Without the padding of extraneous scene-setting, her psychological acuity becomes all the more winding. And somehow, in a plot galvanised by guilt, grief and tragic misunderstandings, quieter observations, such as the pained push-pull dynamic of the parent-teen relationshipor the fathomless depth of feeling that’s conveyed by the touch of a maternal hand , become just as unravelling.
This shares much with novels that find themselves stuffed into that faddy, baggy subgenre we’re encouraged to call “up-lit’. Fortunately, its commitment to the unhappy family is such that even as Audrey is visited by bittersweet epiphanies, there’s a rich and lingering melancholy. “There were as many different beginnings to a life as someone was brave and kind enough to allow themselves,” she finally learns. It’s 11th-hour wisdom and all the truer for it.
• If Only I Could Tell You is published by Orion (14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
