The ‘Curious’ conclusion to a piercing saga

Tolstoy was right, of course, about unhappy families: Each, as he instructs in that famous first line from “Anna Karenina,” is “unhappy in its own way.”

Few, though, are as unhappy in quite so movingly and black comedic a fashion as the Joneses of Fernlight Avenue, Windhover Hill, North London, whose story Gerard Woodward brings to a close in “A Curious Earth” -- the third in a trilogy of novels chronicling the decline and . . . well, decline of contemporary literature’s most oddly cultivated and yet utterly dysfunctional clan, awash in tragedy and cheap booze.

Woodward, a critic and justly admired poet, began the Jones family story in “August,” which tells the story of the Jones family and, particularly, its patriarch Aldous -- a painter turned secondary-school art teacher -- in a series of disastrously revelatory family camping holidays in the unlikely reaches of Wales, set in the 1950s. The second volume, “I’ll Go to Bed at Noon,” advanced the story and focused on Janus, the musical prodigy son of Aldous and his wife, Colette, who -- like his parents -- also happens to be a committedly self-destructive alcoholic. The novel, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, concludes with Janus’ death in a railway accident and Colette’s demise as the result of her personal golden triangle -- liquor, cigarettes and glue-sniffing.

“A Curious Earth” finds Aldous grief-stricken and adrift in Margaret Thatcher’s England. His three living children all have fled Fernlight Avenue -- James, an anthropologist, is in the Amazon rain forest; Julian is a working-class bohemian crewing the ferries that run between Britain and Belgium; and daughter Juliette is comfortably ensconced in a journalistic career and a rather bourgeois relationship “with a middle-aged political correspondent called Bernard” from which she takes brief leaves to hector her father who -- to her pragmatic eye, at least -- seems pointlessly lost in grief.

Truth to tell, Aldous isn’t doing very well at all. He has retired from his teaching position. Since Colette’s death he’s essentially been squatting in the chilly precincts of his home -- the coal fires long since proscribed and central heating something he and Colette never quite got around to -- with only BBC Four on the radio and White Horse scotch for companions. The back garden, once a source of pride, has returned to nature and Aldous conceives of it as something like a beard, grown in mourning. His days pass in a haze of alcohol, listening to the radio from Colette’s favorite chair pulled up against the gas range, whose burners he keeps alight for heat. Snow drifting in from a hole in the roof collects on the upstairs landing and, since the bathroom is up there, Aldous no longer washes regularly, though he heats water on the range to shave. His major preoccupation is contemplation of the kitchen dresser that holds a variety of household detritus, but particularly Colette’s abandoned dentures and her severed ponytail. Even those relics, however, pale before the white shoots sprouting from the potatoes Aldous had left in the dresser months before. Somehow, the pale tubers come to symbolize growth and the generative principle growing out of decay. Cheap scotch will do that sort of thing.

Juliette, on one of the unannounced visits her father dreads, cannot hide her disgust over Aldous’ smell, nor -- on one particularly consequential occasion -- her contempt for his drinking:

“ ‘Do you think that by putting whiskey in your tea you can hide the fact you’re drinking it?’

“ ‘Yes,’ said Aldous, ‘I suppose so.’

“ ‘Well, it doesn’t work. The whole house reeks of whiskey. I could smell it even as I came up the path. . . . I didn’t realize it at first, but now I remember how you’ve always got a mug of tea by your side, always with the teaspoon still in so that it rattles annoyingly. . . .’

“ ‘Yes,’ said Aldous. ‘I don’t even like tea that much. Now I’m on 50 cups a day. . . .’

“ ‘So how much are you getting through?’ she went on.

“ ‘I don’t know.’

“ ‘A bottle a day?’

“ ‘Christ, no. Nothing like that. I’d be dead on a bottle a day --’

“ ‘Half a bottle?’

“ ‘No’ -- the negative was rather less forceful -- ‘I shouldn’t think so -- I don’t keep track, how can you? It’s not much anyway, in the evening, helps me to sleep. . . .’

“ ‘Exactly what Mum used to say. . . .’ ”

Anyone who ever has dealt with grief and the self-medication of the grieving will recognize the acuity of that passage. What gives Woodward’s narratives their particular power, though, is the spark generated by rubbing that sort of emotional truth against black comedy and, thus, Aldous’ mourning is only the jumping-off point for “A Curious Earth’s” picaresque narrative. Juliette’s visit spurs Aldous out of the armchair and into the national gallery, which he knows well. He’s once again drawn to Rembrandt’s portrait of his young mistress and, inspired by its power, resolves to resume painting -- a series of landscapes, the four seasons in his ruined garden. All this effort, under the influence of all that whiskey, leads to a fall in the kitchen, where Aldous has gone to warm his hands.

And, because this is a Woodward novel, that’s where things get interesting. Aldous -- after a suitably hallucinatory stretch alone on the floor -- undergoes a humiliating stay in the hospital. He resolves to demonstrate -- to himself, if no one else -- that he retains at least as much life as those rotting potatoes and visits Julian in Belgium, his first trip abroad since D-Day. Unfortunately, he loses his dentures overboard on the crossing. Still, Julian’s bohemian friends find Aldous, who seems to them a real artist, interesting and he’s soon seduced by a voluptuous, erotic photographer and -- of course -- attempts an abortive pilgrimage to Rembrandt’s house in Holland.

Back in England, Aldous makes a similarly abortive -- and comedic -- stab at learning Flemish and at having an affair with a fellow language student, Maria. It all comes to nothing and Aldous is on the verge of sinking back into alcoholic torpor when his anthropologist son returns home with the Icabaru tribeswoman he has taken as a wife. She proceeds to make her bare-breasted way around the Fernlight garden while her child tortures the cats. Ultimately, Aldous is inspired to transform the house into an art gallery and -- in that final effort -- finds a kind of reconciliation with the shade of his strangely beloved Colette.

As a poet, Woodward is obsessed with domestic detail, with the commonplace objects of daily life and with the way in which long-inhabited houses decay into reliquaries of their inhabitants. In his prose narratives he imbues this notion of physical memory with a special power -- experience and sensation aggregate like barnacles on the hull of a ship until the weight of recollection slows passage nearly to a halt. Redemption and reconciliation occur, but partially and provisionally. The juxtaposition of this emotional veracity with the blackly comedic absurdity of the characters’ stories gives the saga of Aldous Jones and his family its special power as a wholly contemporary threnody.

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timothy.rutten@latimes.com