Her latest novel, “Summerwater,” follows Britons on vacation, but snapshots of a family romance open onto a deeper story about a country’s long-simmering tensions.
In Sarah Moss’s new novel, “Summerwater” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), which portrays a Scottish campground during the course of a sodden August day, a character mournfully reflects that Edinburgh is full of English people “these days.” It’s a phrase that occurs repeatedly: having kids “these days” is not a very clever thing to do; those who have had the misfortune of being born “these days” are given silly names like Honey. Everywhere in the book, people are sighing over the present. A teen-ager remembers his grandmother bemoaning “young people nowadays,” and a small boy listens to his father raging, in the middle of the night, against the inertia or cowardice of his temporary neighbors: “Bloody typical. . . . The state of this country.”
The effort to capture what we mean by “these days” is one way of trying to answer what Thomas Carlyle, in 1839, called the “Condition of England Question.” This was originally a quasi-journalistic endeavor—a report on hard times, a portrait of the way we live now—but in the past century such novels as Virginia Woolf’s “Between the Acts,” Evelyn Waugh’s “Brideshead Revisited,” and Angus Wilson’s “Anglo-Saxon Attitudes” showed that scrutinizing present-day habits and circumstances could also provide a window onto the country’s long and tangled past. Among novelists writing now, Moss, who was born in 1975, appears the most eager to continue this tradition. She started out as an academic specializing in nineteenth-century literature. Her monograph “Spilling the Beans: Eating, Cooking, Reading and Writing in British Women’s Fiction, 1770-1830” (2009), begins with epigraphs from Thomas Malthus (on demography) and Sigmund Freud (on dreams), and her fiction can be viewed as an effort to fuse realist and Romantic priorities. She writes about class and status, property and professional life, but is guided by interests that transcend the specificity of time and place.
Moss’s dual focus has determined her approach to plot and theme. Her intricate début novel, “Cold Earth,” published in 2009, unfolds against the backdrop of a pandemic; it also concerns a graduate student studying the ways in which William Morris refashioned the Vikings for his own age. Adam Goldschmidt, the lovable narrator of “The Tidal Zone” (2016), her most accomplished novel to date, is a stay-at-home dad who spends his days steaming vegetables (“boiling removed too many vitamins”), listening to radio bulletins (“The American police had shot another child for being black”), ruminating on “the mess of England today,” and debating with his daughter Miriam, a fiercely political fifteen-year-old who has just survived a cardiac arrest. He is also “a bloke with a background in the Arts and Crafts movement,” and is researching a postwar effort to rebuild Coventry Cathedral in a vernacular style—“another articulation of the English suspicion of the machineries of mass-production.” Moss’s slight but searing “Ghost Wall” (2018) explores questions of class mistrust, sexism, social mobility, xenophobia, and the North-South divide, while her characters take part in “experiential archeology,” behaving as if it were the Iron Age, right down to the idea of virgin sacrifice.
One of Moss’s claims to novelty, as a portraitist of a postindustrial England saturated with earlier visions of itself, is that her writing is focussed neither on London, as with the work of Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd, nor on the Druid-haunted southwestern county of Wiltshire, as with Penelope Lively’s “Treasures of Time” and Jez Butterworth’s play “Jerusalem.” Her stories have unfolded in Northumberland, Cornwall, the West Midlands, Manchester, and the Shetland Islands. If the tendency to write about established sites of English memory—the well-tapped sources of Albion—can be traced to the influence of William Blake, Moss’s desire to explore less travelled paths was emboldened by the brief, blazing intervention of W. G. Sebald, the German author whose “prose fictions” about the pervasive presence of the past took place in regions such as East Anglia and North Wales.
What’s striking is that Moss has commanded recognition as one of the leading British novelists—a favorite of other writers, a mainstay of end-of-the-year roundups—despite keeping faith with what Sebald dismissed as the “standard” novel during a time of almost maximal, and partly Sebald-inspired, impatience with that form. Although Moss’s writing is deft and resourceful, making use of parallel chronologies and multiple perspectives, of books within books and detailed descriptions of art works both real and invented, the closest she comes to formal experimentation is an aversion to using quotation marks with dialogue.
“Summerwater,” though smaller in scale than most of her previous works, exhibits many of her strengths and preoccupations. In tracing her characters’ finicky, circular, weather-obsessed thoughts (“Ostentatious rain. Pissing it down”), Moss touches on—or, more accurately, brushes past—the Brexit vote, Anglo-Scottish relations, climate change, the concept of rape culture, overpopulation, adolescent depression, and, if not exactly warfare between the generations and the sexes, then at least mutual incomprehension and froideur. The cast of characters proves usefully broad; of the book’s dozen perspectives, each rendered in a colloquial free-indirect style, seven are female and five male, with a span of ages from small child to pensioner.
Privacy is elusive in the novel’s campground setting, especially with the chronic rain. (“If all the neighbours are indoors there are watchers at every window.”) But the proximity of family members and partners is a source of greater trouble. When we meet a young woman named Milly, she is lying on her back; her fiancé, Josh, is insisting that they try to achieve simultaneous orgasms, a “perfect symmetry of desire” that she simply doesn’t want—“She’s still a separate person.” In another cabin, sixteen-year-old Alex is so desperate to escape his parents and his sister that he goes out kayaking and almost kills himself in the process. David, a former doctor, realizes that his retirement is driven by an “unspeakable objective”: “to avoid the beloved” and achieve a “stolen hour’s solitude.” Claire, a worn-out mom, “envies people who have shared custody arrangements.” Both of the first two chapters begin with someone trying to leave a cabin without waking anyone up.
Many of these weary Britons are exercised by the members of a Ukrainian family, the Shevchenkos, who live in Govanhill, a deprived area of Glasgow. This foreign-speaking presence—the family is successively taken to be Bulgarian, Polish, Romanian, and Russian—has provoked the wrath of the other holidaymakers, who chafe at the Shevchenkos’ taste for loud late-night parties. But the family also provides a scapegoat for the frustrations harbored by “this alleged holiday,” and an outlet for other aggressions. “You’re supposed to have left, you know, people like you, did you not get the message?” a small girl, Lola, says, taunting the Shevchenko daughter. A chapter that adopts the perspective of Steve, a middle-aged Mancunian father, begins, “He’s not being a racist. Even though they weren’t meant to be here any more, it’s no odds to him that they’re foreign.” David, the doctor, expresses a more cosmopolitan perspective:
So “Summerwater” is a study of Brexit Britain set far from both the precincts of power and the postindustrial northern towns where Europhobia was most prevalent. Moss attempted something similar in “Ghost Wall,” which, though it took place in the nineteen-nineties, skewered the crankish side of the “Leaver” mind-set. In one memorably tense scene, Bill, an irascible dad whose patriotism extends to cuisine—fish-and-chips ahead of “Paki muck”—is patiently advised by a medieval historian that the Romans had not, in fact, built Hadrian’s Wall out of fear of the “British” queen Boudicca: it was “never the Berlin Wall . . . no raked earth or watchtowers.” Moss, though clearly a fan of the E.U.’s yellow stars and everything they represent, avoids polemic. The narrative scheme of “Summerwater” has been constructed in order to complicate any single strong opinion. David, who sees himself as an enemy of English insularity, is also the kind of person who might very well feel insulated from the Brexit voter’s sense of being overlooked or left behind. When Milly meets him, she is convinced that she has him pegged: “Doctor, final-salary pension scheme, the whole works, probably bought some fabulous Victorian pile in Bearsden for tuppence ha’penny in the ’70s.” But, before the reader pigeonholes David as he pigeonholed “the English,” Milly hits the limits of her prejudicial sketch. She starts speculating that the doctor and his wife also own “a gîte in Provence or Tuscany or whatever,” and then recognizes that, if that were the case, they wouldn’t be staying in this miserable place, alongside somebody like her.
“Summerwater” departs from the human perspectives it inhabits in a series of brief, usually page-long, interludes—sometimes luminous and elegiac, sometimes morbid and menacing—which provide glimpses of phenomena that the characters fail to notice: the Viking sea roads that are still followed by transatlantic flights, for example, or the boats from past centuries that languish at the bottom of the nearby loch. There’s also the four-hundred-and-twenty-million-year-old Highland Boundary Fault, a relic of a time when “the rocks that are now Scotland lay south of the equator,” and a reminder that the land “beneath our buildings, roads, pipes, subway systems, mines and even our fracking” is “always shifting, forming, changing state.”
These non-narrative passages provide clues for what Moss is up to. The novel is powered not by the local tensions it depicts but by the existential conflict underpinning them. When we write about the behavior of a society, Moss seems to say, we are also talking about the workings of the individual mind; collective myths—nostalgia for a pre-industrial past and an unmixed populace, the dream of a sovereign future, some settled story about our present moment—are simply drives and fears writ large.
“Summerwater,” like much of Moss’s recent work, suggests that the Freudian half of her formation is beginning to prevail. “The Tidal Zone” employs the trappings of the social portrait to spin a kind of fable—its opening words are “Once upon a time”—about how human beings confront what Adam calls “the ordinary extraordinary,” the way in which dramatic developments, “terrible things” from the near-death of a treasured daughter to the aerial bombing of a city or, indeed, to the killing of young Black men, must be accommodated by our vision of the normal, the familiar, or the routine. The historian in “Ghost Wall,” a novel centered on acts of aggression and abuse, observes that it’s a mistake to think that the Celts possessed primitive minds but “we don’t.”
Now, in “Summerwater,” Moss has delivered a series of snapshots of the family romance, complete with reflections on sibling rivalry, fear of the outsider, attachment, sex, physical decay, and what one character thinks of as people’s “unconsciousnesses, their repressed selves or what have you.” An engagement with the way we live now opens onto a deeper concern with the way we have always lived. Even as she immerses the reader in customs and mores, she emphasizes their contingency—the truth that, as a mother and running enthusiast observes in the opening pages, our “ways of doing things” are “mostly just habit.” It’s hard to miss that the novel follows “Ghost Wall” in turning from the brashness of daily life toward a more remote or enclosed realm, in closer touch with human atavism—and also, perhaps, with what really matters to this brilliant, confounding writer. ♦
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