Books of The Times

Home as a Power Base and Balm to an Arid Heart

By RICHARD EDER


THE HOUSE ON FORTUNE STREET
By Margot Livesey.
320 pages. Harper. $24.95.


The vitamin-deficiency diseases, a longtime scourge in the impoverished corners of the world, are all but unknown in its well-nourished ones. The British novelist Margot Livesey, a shrewd diagnostician of Western mini-maladies, writes of two talented young women whose lives are malformed by what you might call emotional scurvy.

The deficiency that afflicts Abigail, a theater director, and her lifelong friend Dara, a psychological counselor, is a father. Abigail’s was feckless and disengaged; Dara’s left home when she was 5.

The two are the focus of the novel, but Ms. Livesey is after a larger and sharper view of their comfortable world. “The House on Fortune Street” is a title with a sting in its tail.

It refers to the expensive refuge in the Brixton section of London that Abigail remodels to shore against her inner ruins. At the same time “fortune” (a two-faced word that twins precariousness with prosperity) suggests the skull concealed beneath the polished skin of the women’s lovers, parents and friends; and the ambitions, illusions, compulsions and betrayals through which the women stumble.

Concealment is the novel’s deforming villain, an expansive mask borne about upon shriveled, misstepping legs. Whereas subsequent disclosure, with its painful results, sows explosive momentum through a story that otherwise bogs down as it burrows through so many layers of insight that it all but sinks out of sight.

Ms. Livesey uses an interesting device to get to her two main characters. She approaches Abigail initially not through the childhood damage she suffered but through the adult damage she inflicts, mainly upon Sean, her sweet-natured lover. Before getting to Dara, whose suffering proves suicidal, the author devotes a section to Cameron, Dara’s father, a kindly man whose pedophile inclinations, essentially unacted upon, caused his wife, Fiona, to divorce him and, for years, to ban all contact with his children.

Sean, blocked in his efforts to write a dissertation on Keats, makes a meager living as a hack writer in partnership with a friend, Valentine. (One project is a study of how those who assist loved ones to commit suicide pass the time while waiting for them to do it; a husband goes up in a balloon to see if he can spot his wife’s soul rising.)

Peacefully married to a fellow student, Sean was appropriated after a fiery campaign by Abigail, who brings him to live at Fortune Street. Her love life had been a series of casual affairs, two or three at a time, but Sean arouses real passion. For a while. Then she begins charging him rent and, after that, starts an affair with Valentine.

Only in the book’s last section is Abigail shown as something other than monstrously cold, though all along she provides more verve than the other, less vigorous characters. Her father, George, an airy charmer, moved the family every few months without regard to Abigail’s schooling. Determined to study, she left home at 15, took a series of menial jobs to support herself and did well enough to win a university scholarship.

Years later, having made something of a theater career, she goes to stay with George, who is dying of a brain tumor. She demands that he recognize the damage he has done her, but even in pain he is insouciant as ever.

By this time it is evident that Abigail is both a product of George’s fecklessness (those serial and simultaneous affairs, that easy betrayal of Sean) and a reaction against it (her hardworking career and above all her tenacious attachment to Fortune Street).

Abigail’s need for permanence had also forged her attachment to Dara, and to the refuge and support she found as a student in the warm, apparently secure home of Dara’s mother and her second husband, Alastair. (He of course turns out to be a sleaze.) As for Dara, she is a quivering mess, prone to long unhappy affairs and betrayal by other sleazes.

Dara is tedious. A couple of pages are devoted to her migraines. The preceding section about Cameron, her fugitive father, is far more interesting. He is a decent, affectionate man and a loving parent whose struggle to resist his attraction to little girls succeeds (except for a momentary Charles Dodgson-like lapse, when he takes a photograph of one of Dara’s friends half-naked) at the cost of his marriage, his access to his children and semi-darkness of the spirit.

The larger cost, of course, is Dara’s crippling and eventually fatal anguish over his unexplained abandonment. Even when Cameron and Dara come together years later, he can’t bring himself to disclose the real circumstances of his disappearance. Concealment here, as in so much else (Abigail’s adultery, her father’s secretive elusiveness, Sean’s betrayal by his friend Valentine, the phony image of conjugal fidelity in Dara’s stepfather’s home), is the destroyer.

Ms. Livesey’s writing is acutely observant; her psychological algebra is admirable and sometimes astonishing. Except for the wicked Abigail and the part-saintly Cameron, though, her characters tend to resemble algebra’s purposeful X’s and Y’s rather more than the grand purposelessness of the creatures of fiction.