Catherine Chidgey on Loss-of-Innocence Narratives

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The appeal of loss-of-innocence narratives lies, I think, in the way they invite us to experience a character’s seismic changes as they unfold—and in the way they can call up in vivid detail our own pasts. I suspect it was inevitable I would write a novel like Pet, that takes as its jumping-off point a deeply charismatic, glamorous woman who taught at my Catholic school. Every girl in my class wanted to be her, and every girl wanted to be her pet. This larger-than-life figure stayed with me for decades, and my memories of the intensity of our feelings around her sparked my story of manipulation and betrayal narrated by 12-year-old Justine.

Child narrators can be tricky to get right, but every syllable of Kit de Waal’s debut My Name is Leon feels authentic. The novel tells the story of a biracial boy growing up in 1980s Britain—Action Man is in the toy shops, The Dukes of Hazzard is on TV, and Margaret Thatcher is in power. When Leon’s brother Jake is born, their mother Carol struggles to care for her sons; in the grip of post-natal depression, she succumbs to her own demons. As a result, Leon and Jake enter the foster care system, where Jake is quickly adopted—because he is an infant and because he is white. Leon, left to face a harsher reality, becomes acutely aware of the racial disparities around him. His foster mother is affectionate, but he cannot help overhearing the conversations she has with her sister: there’s no chance a family will want to adopt him. Some of the most moving passages in the book centre around Leon’s love for his baby brother. He imagines that ‘someone else is holding Jake and kissing him. Someone else is looking into the perfect blue of his perfect eyes. Someone else is smelling him and touching the soft skin on the back of his hand.’ We feel his aching sense of loss; we long for him to be reunited with Jake. De Waal’s Leon is a stunning act of ventriloquism, bringing him to authentic three-dimensional life without ever veering into sentimentality. This book broke my heart and mended it again.

Kirsty Gunn’s debut Rain also features a superbly evoked child narrator. Twelve-year-old Janey spends summer with her family at the lake, passing ‘endless bright days of watery green’ with her little brother while their parents drink and their marriage cracks. Water suffuses this taut, luminous work, beginning with the title and leaking out to chill every page. The lush, claustrophobic descriptions of landscape—‘you were surrounded so closely by growth that you could have felt stifled by it, the way it pushed in on you, surrounded you with its dark odours’—take form alongside a mounting unease that permeates the story. When the shattering crisis comes, we know it will haunt Janey forever. It’s easy to see why Gunn’s dreamlike, poetic masterpiece heralded a major new talent. She brings an outstanding lightness of touch to this dark narrative of guilt, sacrifice, and mistakes that can’t be undone.

Martin Amis’ Time’s Arrow takes audacious liberties with structure and logic, with the story playing out in reverse. The opening scene sets the stage for a mind-bending read: bewildered protagonist Odilo Unverdorben, a German doctor, emerges ‘out of the blackest sleep’ to find himself on a bed surrounded by American doctors. Shortly afterwards, three orderlies deal with him ‘by means of electricity and air’, and then one of them kisses him: ‘I think I know the name of this kiss. It is called the kiss of life.’ Gradually it becomes clear to us: we are witnessing his resuscitation and death backwards. This riddle of a novel brims with questions, and Unverdorben himself reports ‘the sense of starting out on a terrible journey, towards a terrible secret’. What he does not know, at the strange start of this journey, is that in his earlier career he worked as a Holocaust doctor; the terrible secret the story hurtles towards is Auschwitz. The inversion of time forces a re-evaluation of cause and effect—in the camp, Unverdorben’s actions are ostensibly benevolent, and he seems to heal rather than exterminate. Yet he carries a constant sense of unease and self-condemnation, experiencing the repercussions of guilt without an obvious basis. The shunning of conventional linear progression may seem like an indulgent exercise in gimmickry, but in Amis’ hands the unsettling chronology is a genius device, underscoring the notion that evil is not always apparent at first glance, and that seemingly good actions can have dark origins. A profound exploration of memory and conscience.

Rick Moody’s darkly comedic novel The Ice Storm is a compelling exploration of 1970s suburban discontent and familial disintegration set against the backdrop of a terrible storm. With its masterful storytelling and nuanced characters, the novel delves deep into themes of alienation, coming of age, and the breakdown of traditional values. The narrative revolves around two neighboring families, the Hoods and the Williams, whose lives intersect during a tumultuous Thanksgiving weekend. As severe weather descends on their Connecticut town, the characters find themselves trapped both physically and emotionally, their stasis mirroring the frozen landscape outside. Moody gives voice to the individual struggles and desires of each family member, exposing their secrets, disillusionments, and attempts to break free from their suburban monotony. ‘The idea of betrayal was in the air,’ he observes. ‘The Summer of Love had migrated, in its drug-resistant strain, to the Connecticut suburbs about five years after its initial introduction.’ His portrayal of adolescent sexual awakening is particularly powerful; the young characters grapple with dangerous desires that seem almost to call up the chaos of the storm.

Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides, set in 1970s Michigan, also chips away the façade of smalltown America. A haunting evocation of the time when we are no longer children but not yet adults, it is told in the collective voice of a group of neighbourhood boys obsessed with the tragic Lisbon sisters. The girls, particularly the risk-taking Lux, embody an unattainable ideal of beauty and innocence. The boys are captivated by their enigmatic allure and yearn to understand them, yet the sisters remain distant and elusive. This unattainability becomes a source of both fascination and frustration for the boys—and for the reader, it taps into the profound longings of adolescence.

Like Moody, Eugenides explores the suffocating nature of suburban life and the constraints it places on individuals. The overprotective Lisbon parents impose stringent rules on their daughters, and the house itself functions as a symbol of entrapment and isolation: ‘on a shelf above the radiator, five pairs of bronzed baby shoes preserved for all time the unstimulating stage of the Lisbon girls’ infancy’. The language of the novel is often melancholic, dreamlike: ‘For hours Mary would sit before the mirror, watching her face swim through the alterations of counterfeit worlds.’ These lyrical descriptions enhance the novel’s ethereal atmosphere and sense of nostalgia, but Eugenides also crafts a compelling plot. Equal parts mystery and meditation on the fragility and transience of youth, this is a story that lingers.

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