47. The Tidal Zone by Sarah Moss
Adam is a house husband, “one of the unemployed with a PhD”. When he’s not looking after all the cooking and cleaning at home, he’s picking up his daughters (15 year old Miriam and 8 year old Rose) from school – punctuated by odd bits of teaching and research at the local university (Warwick, I deduced). His wife Emma is a hard-working GP, perpetually resentful about her long hours and her role as the breadwinner, but also reluctant to relinquish them or to let go completely of the domestic role she feels she ought to have. So far, so middlebrow novel of middle class angst. This all comes to a sudden end when Adam receives a call from Miriam’s school to say that there has been an 'incident'. Miriam’s heart has suddenly stopped, causing her to collapse and technically die – and, although one of the teachers has given her CPR and kept her alive until the ambulance arrived, nobody is sure what the long-term consequences of Miriam’s collapse will be. Worse still, they are not sure why it happened, or whether it could happen again.
This uncertainty, and Adam’s anguished attempts to come to terms with it, is at the heart of the novel. By the time he arrives at the hospital, Miriam seems to be back to her usual self – an argumentative, sarcastic, politically-engaged teenager (perhaps a bit too precociously eloquent to be entirely convincing as a 15-year old). But Adam has suddenly realised the fragility of life, and how it could stop, without warning, in a moment. The rest of the novel is about Adam ad Emma’s attempts to live in peace with this knowledge, and to stop it from destroying the rest of their lives. There are two other stories woven in with this: one is about the architect Basil Spence, and his plans to build a new cathedral on the bombed out ruins of Coventry Cathedral (the context for this is that Adam is researching this for a book); and the other is about Adam’s American father Eli, who leaves his Jewish family in Brooklyn, drops out, goes West to California and joins a commune, eventually ending up in Cornwall, where he meets Adam’s mother. I can see what Sarah Moss is trying to do with these stories – they have common themes of sudden destruction, of rebuilding after the second world war, of finding roots – but I’m not sure it quite worked for me. They’re all fascinating stories (unlike most of the reviewers on Goodreads, I actually really enjoyed the bits about Coventry Cathedral!), but it ended up feeling a bit “bitty”.
There are a fair number of critical reviews for this book – mostly complaining that not much happens (Miriam doesn’t die from her heart problem), that Adam spends a lot of time going on about domestic chores in minute detail, and that the whole thing is just about the trivial concerns of very middle class people. I didn’t actually mind any of these criticisms, personally. Yes, not much happens, but Moss’s writing is so good that I really didn’t mind – also, it’s not a novel of action but of ideas and feelings, and it succeeds on those terms. Yes, Adam spends a lot of time enumerating the many chores that he has to do – but that’s because a major theme of the novel is gender roles and how we balance work-work with the unpaid labour of caring and parenting, and how that can affect our identity and sense of ourselves. Also, it’s really good to see a novel in which the primary parent is the father, and Moss is really good at unpicking all the tiny strains that that can put on a marriage and on a parent – whether it’s Emma spending her day off from work cleaning because she feels she’s not a proper mother otherwise, or whether it’s Adam being invited to a birthday pool party so there’s a parent who can take the boys to the toilets (and himself coming under suspicion for being a paedophile while he waits outside the ladies’ changing room where his daughter has to go without him). It’s also clear that some of his focus on domestic minutiae is just what parents do when they’re under stress – focus on the tiny things that they can control to try and make up for all the other shit that’s out of control. Also, I don’t think it’s a bad thing that this kind of “wifework” is exposed publicly – I know I spend half my time desperately trying to juggle lists of work and emails and things to cook for dinner and birthday presents to buy and PE kit to wash before Tuesday and…
It is undoubtedly a very middle-class novel, but so what? So are lots of people, and being well-educated and living a comfortable middle-class existence (although Adam and Emma bemoan being priced out of the property market!) doesn’t insulate you from terrible things happening. Even middle-class children can have hearts that suddenly stop one day. Maybe this all spoke to me in particular, because my older child was diagnosed with a very serious condition when he was 6 months old and needed to have years of operations and hospital treatment for it. The sections that describe being in hospital with a sick child, and the desperate camaraderie that forms between the parents on the ward, really rang true for me. I now work at a university and the description of Adam’s life is spot-on: the exploitation of non-tenured lecturers on zero-hours contracts, the jostling for position among faculty members, the uneasy relationship between the overpaid management and the people who actually do the work. So it’s a middle-class novel about middle-class people, but it still has a lot of heart mixed in with all that brain (and Adam is definitely someone whose heart is struggling his brain).
It's the first of Sarah Moss’s novels that I’ve read, but I’ll definitely be reading more. I have already bought The Ghost Wall on the back of all the reviews on here earlier this year – and I bought Night Waking because it was published in 2011 at exactly the moment that I was grappling with my own night waking, feeding an insatiable 3-month old at hourly intervals. Ironically, I didn’t manage to read it precisely because of that (and because of aforementioned hospital stays), but I’m definitely bumping it right up my list now!