I have always loved Rachel Joyce’s work, especially the Harold Fry series, but I also adored her more recent novel Miss Benson’s Beetle. This novel was slightly different from her other work, while it did have an eccentric character on a very singular quest and kept that complexity of emotions she does so well, it also had an historical context which I loved. In A Homemade God we see similar complex relationships, but within a family who have a famous father. Vic Kemp is a painter and I have an absolute fascination with painter’s lives and relationships. I love art and have read widely on groups like the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the group who gathered around Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant down at Charleston in Sussex. After seeing a Lucien Freud retrospective at the Tate I was intrigued by his family. His children seemed to be the epitome of that creative and eccentric family we come to expect from artists. Bohemian upbringings are just so interesting because of how the development and character of the children are affected by it and how that family copes with the ‘genius’ in their midst.
Here the family in question are Vic and his four children – Netta, Susan, Iris and Goose (short for Gustav and the only boy). They’ve been parented by Vic and a series of au pairs after the sudden death of their mother just after Iris was born. Their father’s art came first always and the conditions he needed in order to create were paramount, so the oldest girls often played the mother role for Iris and Goose, especially when Vic inevitably slept with the au pairs and they left. Vic was not an artist celebrated by the establishment. The description of his paintings brought Jack Vettriano to mind, criticised heavily by the art world, but very popular with the public. Many of Vic’s paintings had a sexual element to them, a sort of soft BDSM theme, except for his only painting of one of his children, Iris. Depicted on the beach with a sandcastle and a man in the background, it brings up mixed memories for Iris. Now grown up, his children are stunned when Vic suddenly starts losing weight and drinking green, sludgy health drinks. It’s just so out of character. His diet is being looked after by his new girlfriend, 27 year old Bella-Mae. None of his children have met her and she doesn’t seem keen on trying. Within weeks Vic announces they’re engaged and Netta suggests that they all stand back and give this the space it needs to fizzle out. A couple of weeks later, Vic announces their marriage with a single photograph from the family home in Orta on Isola Son Guilio with Bella-Mae in such a heavy veil they can’t make out her face. They are staying at the family villa, situated on an island in the middle of Lake Orta and only two days later Netta is stunned by a phone call from a stranger called Laszlo, claiming to be Bella’s cousin. Vic has been dragged from the lake, drowned after a morning swim went wrong as the mist descended. Vic knew that lake so well. Why would he go swimming in the mist? His children come together to travel to Orta, to finally meet their new stepmother and to find out whether she has killed their father.
I really enjoyed the different personalities of the Kemp siblings and how they complement and clash with each other. Netta has definite older sister energy. She’s the most organised and ambitious of all the siblings with a background in law. She is the most cynical too, convinced Bella’s health drinks have poisoned her father and now after two days of marriage she could inherit everything. Her instinct was to ransack Vic’s London home for the anything resembling a will and to find Vic’s final painting. There’s nothing, but maybe he was painting in Orta? Susan is also older and very organised especially when it comes to food or her stepsons. Married to Warwick who is a much older man she has some empathy and understanding for her father’s relationship. She hasn’t worked, but stayed at home to look after Warwick’s boys which has been a thankless task as they’ve barely accepted her. Susan is passionate about food, but she chose a relationship without that same feeling. Perhaps viewing the volcanic nature of Vic’s relationships she decided to go for a calmer and more stable love. It has proved a successful partnership but there are wild depths underneath Susan’s calm exterior and when she meets Bella’s cousin Laszlo they might rise to the surface.
Goose and Iris, the younger siblings, both seem lost somehow, perhaps because they don’t have those memories of their mother and only remember the erratic presence of Vic and the revolving au pairs. Since his father’s agent Harry set up Goose’s first exhibition, he has never painted again. When left alone just before his open view, he destroyed his canvasses and nobody knows why. He seemed catatonic and voluntarily checked into hospital for his mental health. He lives quite a lonely life and never talks about his sexuality or takes a partner home to meet family. He works quietly as his father’s studio assistant and lives alone. Iris lives alone too and she comes across a bit liked a startled fawn. She follows behind her sisters and dotes on her father more than others, struggling to keep her distance when Netta suggests it. She does keep secrets though, seismic in their power. As they all travel to their villa in Northern Italy, ready to confront their father’s 27 year old widow and her cousin, Netta tells them they have two objectives. Find anything that could be a will, even if it’s on the back of an envelope and find that last painting Vic claimed to be working on.
Bella isn’t what the siblings expect and nor is the villa. The villa looks beautiful and tidy for once. Bella seems insubstantial and too fragile to have caused such an uproar. She looks like she might blow away in a breeze. Yet they’ve pictured her with an iron will, imposing her diet on their father and gaining their inheritance. She will prove to be a mirror through which each of them evaluate their lives. I love family sagas and this one is brilliant. It’s psychologically fascinating and I’m not going to ruin that for you by delving too deeply. I was absolutely transfixed! I couldn’t work out whether there was deliberate manipulation at play or if this was just a case of an outsider causing people to view everything through a different lens. Is Bella a destructive force or a helpful one? Whatever she is, the siblings will have to look at themselves, their choices and their relationship to their father. Some revelations will be explosive and take place in public – one particular meal is cataclysmic. Other revelations are quieter, insidious or internal but no less devastating. Goose’s story left me furious and devastated at the same time. The book works almost like therapy, but without the care and ethics. No one will come out of this trip unaffected.
The author made me think about how we view artists and our expectations of them – whether they are potters, painters or writers. We read about their messy and eccentric lives with fascination, but we don’t always consider the damage they do to those closest to them. I’ve always wondered how Lucien Freud’s daughters felt about posing for him, especially in their awkward teenage years. Iris’s story gave me some insight and made me feel deeply uncomfortable. This was such a beautifully complex study of a family’s dynamics and how each sibling positions themselves within it. Rachel Joyce has depicted the way we mythologise people within our family groups and the stories we choose to represent us. We choose stories to tell others who we are and when we do that we can embroider or edit for the effect we want. Think about the stories in your families and whether they’re honest or whether you are trying to represent yourselves within a particular class, religion or other social structure? Do we do this consciously or unconsciously? This is a very different novel for the author but it’s definitely built on her ability to present very deep emotions and the truth of human experience. I think it’s her best yet.
After reading the novel, you might enjoy reading this article about Lucien Freud’s relationship with his daughter Annie.
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