A family’s past, a child’s awareness

THE English novelist and critic John Lanchester always has been a writer of rare intelligence.

His new book, “Family Romance: A Love Story,” is something rarer still -- an utterly unsentimental memoir of his own parents and childhood.

That’s no small thing, given English writers’ general penchant to sentimentalize their childhoods, even when ostensibly bitter about them. Consider, for example, Evelyn Waugh’s sly dismissal of the fictional Sebastian Flyte as “in love” with his childhood, which Waugh then depicts in so burnished a fashion that it seems to leave his character no other choice. Bracket that with the preposterous hurt in the last stanza of Philip Larkin’s famous indictment of his parents: “Man hands on misery to man. / It deepens like a coastal shelf. / Get out as early as you can, / And don’t have any kids yourself.”

Lanchester’s three works of fiction, particularly “The Debt to Pleasure” -- his first and finest novel -- all have been richly allusive. He indirectly signals his intentions for this memoir with a title borrowed from Sigmund Freud. The founder of psychoanalysis employed the term “family romance” to describe the common childhood fantasy that one is so “special” that the ordinary parents and siblings around you cannot possibly be your real family. By imagining another equally special set of parents somewhere else, the child is free to experience desire and anger toward the mother and father with whom he lives.

Similarly, Lanchester begins his recollection by invoking literature’s most famous lines about family life, “the opening sentence of ‘Anna Karenina.’ ‘All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’ It’s a magnificent line, so sonorous and resonant that it makes it easy for us not to notice it isn’t true. Part of its falsehood lies in the fact that happy families aren’t especially alike, any more than unhappy ones are unalike. But at a deeper level, the falsehood lies in the idea that a family is either happy or unhappy. Life, family life, just isn’t that simple. Most families are both happy and unhappy, often intensely so, and often at the same time.”

Truth and falsehood are the key ingredients in the love story that Lanchester, an only child, now 45, teases from the facts of his parents’ life and marriage. When he interred his mother’s ashes alongside those of his father in a north Yorkshire churchyard in 1998, the writer had begun to realize that the Irish-born woman was not the person she had led either him or her husband to believe. Her son, John, had known vaguely that his mother had at one time been a nun, but neither he nor his father had known crucial things about her life before entering the convent and about the personal tragedies that followed her decision to leave. She had, for example, lied about her age, so that her husband thought she was years younger than she was. That secret may have accounted for what Lanchester calls the great sadness of his parents’ life together: Her inability, despite repeated efforts, to conceive another child.

Their life together is a grippingly novelistic one. The writer’s father was an international banker who shuttled his little family through an exotic series of East Asian posts. Through it all, Julie maintained her secrets, while the father, a decent, devoted and deeply reticent man, slipped into disappointment over his lack of promotion -- and their son into greater and greater distance from a mother who gave her highest attention to maintaining her deceits. Much of the book is given over to the reconstruction of her real life, which Lanchester undertook following her death. It’s a meticulous and yet wistfully compassionate piece of reportage.

When he turns to his own relationship with Julie, he writes: “I am the happy ending. That is a big part of what is strange for me about the story of my mother’s life. I am the symbol of her lucky escape, the thing that prevented her life from being a cautionary tale about an ‘ex-nun.’ I am the reason everything turned out all right. Except, of course, nobody’s life feels like the happy ending to somebody else’s.”

In some sense, the story pivots on Lanchester’s summation of that very ordinary experience of being imperfectly loved by loving but imperfect parents. As the author recalls, “I had a happy childhood. Most days, though, there was an anxiety somewhere, to which I stood in some relation -- it was growing worse or better, leaving me alone for a moment or not. It didn’t prevent me from getting on with my childhood, and it didn’t make me miserable -- just, often, anxious.”

And the sources of that anxiety?

“As for what underlay these fears,” he writes, “some of it was obviously genetic. People have different innate levels of anxiety and experience it with different levels of intensity. Mine is on the high side, and part of that is just the luck of the genetic draw. But part of it, also, I’ve come to believe, has to do with my parents’ way of being. Specifically, with ways in which they were not there. My father was a lovely man, but he was scared of strong feelings and tried to avoid them; he felt -- he knew -- that they were dangerous. And my mother had secrets that, to her, felt explosively dangerous. She was scared of things inside herself. She knew things that no one else must be allowed to know.... That left me with a feeling that there were things inside my parents that were not safe; that they were not a secure repository for their own feelings, let alone for mine. I could tell that something wasn’t quite right. And that left me anxious.”

In fact, as he discusses in an entirely matter-of-fact way, Lanchester’s adult years have been marked by a struggle with phobias, severe panic attacks and agoraphobia. He has declined medication for his conditions but benefited from psychotherapy.

At the end of his explorations in “Family Romance,” Lanchester both literally and figuratively writes his tormented -- though not necessarily unhappy -- mother’s epitaph. Like all real love stories, that of his unhappy happy family ends with reconciliation, if not outright absolution.

timothy.rutten@latimes.com