New Voices Spin Tales of Fiction, Mostly Fiction
[In the following excerpt, Rubin offers a mixed review of Behind the Scenes at the Museum.]
From England, more specifically the cathedral city of York, comes an ambitious, exuberant first novel that takes the form of a young woman narrating her autobiography, starting with the moment of her conception and dipping into past generations of her family while moving forward through her own girlhood.
The narrator of Kate Atkinson's Behind the Scenes at the Museum is Ruby Lennox, youngest daughter of a family that lives "above the shop," in this case, a pet shop. Dad is a hard-drinking skirt chaser, Mom a mean-spirited bundle of resentments, big sister Patricia a model of moral and scholastic rectitude, and middle sister Gillian a bratty egotist. As for Ruby—she is, in her own words, "alive … a precious jewel … a drop of blood," with an uncanny ability to perceive and describe, everything going on around her, even before she is born!
It doesn't take the fetal Ruby very long to notice—with some dismay—that she is not an eagerly anticipated arrival. "Still, never mind—the sun is high in the sky and it's going to be a beautiful day again," remarks the optimistic embryo. "The future is like a cupboard full of light and all you have to do is find the key that opens the door." Birth, however, proves difficult: "My tender skin, as yet untouched by any earthly atmosphere, is being chafed by this sausage-making process. (Surely this can't be natural?)"
Ruby's young life, growing up in England in the 1950s and '60s, is interspersed with vignettes from the lives of her mother, aunt, grandmother, and great-grandmother. Going backward and forward in time, Ruby's vivacious, tartly funny narrative manages to include some of the main events of the past century: two world wars, bombing raids, lost brothers and sweethearts, the coronation of Elizabeth II, the lure of Elvis and the Beatles.
Despite Ruby's evident cheerfulness, it is not a pretty story: Bickering, neglectful parents, sudden deaths, reversals of fortune, and broken hearts abound, but all are conveyed in a brisk, breezy style that at times conceals bitterness beneath a mask of blitheness.
Well received in England, where it won the Whitbread award, Behind the Scenes at the Museum may be a little too relentlessly flippant for some tastes, and not quite as brilliantly written as all that (I squirmed at a few grammatical faux pas). But it marks the debut of a distinctive new voice that should appeal to readers who enjoy the panache of a Fay Weldon or the witty inventiveness of a Carol Shields. And it strikes a nice balance between fantasy and reality.
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