[In the following review, Clee offers a positive assessment of Goodness.]

Tim Parks's sixth novel [Goodness] (one was written under a pseudonym) returns to a subject he has explored in earlier books: that of mania lurking just below the surface of suburban lives. Goodness is also the second work of fiction published this year, following Michael Dibdin's Dirty Tricks, to suggest that Thatcherite individualism may contain the seeds of murderous ruthlessness.

George Crawley believes himself to be a good man, and his wife, despite having received a fair amount of evidence to the contrary, encourages his belief. The reader of George's narrative knows him to be an insufferable prig. As Iris Murdoch showed in The Nice and the Good, there are events which will find out all but the truly good, or the truly cynical. For George, such an event is the birth of his handicapped child.

Everything goes well for George until Hilary's arrival. He has escaped from his stifling childhood home in west London, where he lived with his self-sacrificing mother, racist grandfather, retarded aunt and flighty sister, to university and then to a successful career in computer software. He becomes a network planner, someone who, from a keyboard, attempts to solve huge organizational problems. He marries the eligible Shirley (“she would never embarrass you … plus she was an eager lover and she swore blind that she didn't want kids”). They acquire suitable friends. “Margaret” creates the right climate for them, and they prosper.

Then Shirley decides she does, after all, want a child. George tries to assuage her by buying her flowers and bringing home brochures for flashy new cars; when this does not work he announces that he is going to commit adultery, and does. The couple break up, and are tearfully reunited. Shirley becomes pregnant.

Hilary has Christenson's syndrome, involving, in her case, severe physical deformities and mental retardation. Everyone has their own explanation for this disaster. George's mother, the character in the novel who best represents goodness, thinks it is her fault. Shirley believes Hilary's disability to be a punishment for adultery (she has had an affair too). George believes that a failure to confront disability in the family is to blame, and that Hilary represents a problem that must have a solution: he even draws a flow chart. The proposed solution brings the novel to a climax that is both farcical and frightening.

An outline of this novel, with its signpost of a title, makes it sound schematic, but it is not. Parks's gift is for evoking, often in sinister detail the everyday: gestures, idiosyncrasies of speech, the minutiae of suburban existence. As in Loving Roger (1986), he sustains the voice of a blinkered narrator with convincing control. Just occasionally, in Goodness, the irony is too broad, particularly in George's sporadic flashes of cynicism (“Mistresses, one feels, shouldn't have periods”) seem out of character with his usual self-deceiving pronouncements. But these are quibbles.