The Life to Come by Michelle de Kretser (review)

Pippa Reynolds is a novelist on the rise, one who draws greater critical and popular attention with each work. Exhaustive in her artistry, she carries a notebook everywhere she goes, jotting down scraps from other people's lives, meanings for unfamiliar words, observed details of place and space. Her husband's musical background and his way of speaking "with the force of poetry" are his chief charms. Pippa asserts, "He'll be good for my writing" (188). She eyes a future of winning awards. Pippa is ambitious, willing to work hard, determined; in fact, she has "everything needed for greatness except talent" (205).

Michelle de Kretser's new novel, The Life to Come, pursues in episodic fashion the stories of five: George, Cassie, Celeste, Christabel, and Pippa. The thread uniting the several strands of the novel, Pippa appears in the stories of the others—George's student, then tenant; Cassie's high school friend; Celeste's newly made friend during Pippa's European tour; Christabel's neighbor. Beyond Pippa, however, there are other links among the five: all, for instance, are in flight from a life before. For Pippa that flight centers on her identity; until she was eighteen, her name was Narelle. Filing the application to change her name, newly minted Pippa said, "No one called Narelle's ever going to win the Booker" (47). But the name change removes her as well from her family and her history before she moved to Sydney. For Celeste, child of French parents once involved in the resistance during the French-Algerian conflicts, that life before is her growing up in Perth, where her mother sought refuge after the disappearance of her father. Now living in Paris, where she is visited by her Australian half brother and his family, Celeste shudders at the world she escaped: "She had fled the AMP Building, the hot, flat streets, the catastrophic light" (101). Whether a strained childhood defined by a parental breakup (George), a privileged, eventless childhood (Cassie), or a life in Ceylon—not Sri Lanka—ended by civil war (Christabel), de Kretser's characters find themselves "looking at the past: a cavernous hall . . . where all the furniture was ugly or broken. . . . They gave thanks for their escape" (212–13).

The present is often confused and chaotic. On the one hand, Pippa's work consumes many of her waking hours, the success of her third novel promising an ever-growing fame, at least in Australian circles. But she is also consumed by the minutiae of contemporary life: email messages, Facebook postings, tweets sharing supportive comments toward fellow writers, photos of meals made and shared, inanities passed to and from strangers. In the midst of these twin obsessions, she suddenly develops a third: a gnawing fear that her husband is straying, that he is not spending time with his ailing parents as he claims but using those visits as a mask for his dallying.

Celeste, as another example, takes a smug pride in her simple Paris life—modest apartment, bicycle for transport, small but livable earnings as translator and teacher. She is also deeply in love with Sabine, a nearby florist who is also a wife and mother. Yet when her brother and family arrive from Perth, she cannot escape the feeling that her life is small and pinched. "Is this all there is?" she asks herself more insistently (105), especially as Celeste must also confront the tenuous nature of her tie with Sabine, who speaks of the need to be more present for her children and mentions in passing the possibility of a family move to the United States. The tasteful, satisfying life Celeste has claimed as fulfilling gives way before unsettling prospects: "[T]he future shrank to the single point of solitary, penny-pinching old age" (121).

The several characters all stumble about, generally relieved that the past is past, trying to make sense of themselves in the present...