There are two ways for a debut novel to make a splash in the crowded sea of new books. The first is to try something entirely new in subject matter or form, which risks being unreadably esoteric or just plain boring. (Remember six months ago, when Covid fiction still seemed a novelty?) The other is to follow a traditional path, do it exceptionally well and hope that somebody notices.
With her debut novel At the Table Claire Powell has taken the second option. Even in appearance the book stands out with its strikingly funny cover photo of a young woman face down in an elaborately decorated cream cake. It promises much comedy of embarrassment, and we get that, but the comedy lowers our defences and lets other things in too.
The well-trodden route Powell has pursued is the family story: parents and children, marriage and separation. What could be new about that? Well for one thing, the novel is structured around food: each chapter describes members of a London family getting together with others to eat. Gimmicky perhaps, but, as James Salter put it, life is meals and these sociable occasions provide an opportunity for people to unload, fight or flirt.
It starts off badly (for the characters anyway; the reader has a whale of a time). The Maguires — Linda and Gerry with their adult children, Nicole and Jamie — are meeting for a Mother’s Day lunch that turns out to be an excruciating exhibition in passive-aggressive parenting. Nicole and Jamie quickly remember that no matter how successful you are as an adult, when you’re back with your parents, childhood resumes. Linda clucks and fusses, overdoing the small stuff (“Stop touching it or you will make it greasy,” she snaps as Nicole strokes her hair) and minimising what matters (Gerry “has had a bit of a heart attack”). In the words of Sigmund Freud, if it’s not one thing, it’s your mother. Worst of all, Linda and Gerry have chosen this special occasion to announce to their children their separation after decades of marriage.
But nobody in this book is a baddie — the chapters cycle around the viewpoints of the four Maguires, so we get to know all of them. Jamie is the family’s nice guy, but his stability begins to wobble as he worries that his relationship with his fiancée, Lucy, is stale even before their wedding. “They have only had sex in the living room once, and that was because they were sleeping in there while the paint in their bedroom dried.” Nicole at 35 is still drinking and tindering like someone a decade younger, and beginning to feel that she’s on a train, watching life roll by beyond the window. Linda and Gerry are too busy raking up the past to think about the future.
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What sets At the Table apart is Powell’s acute understanding not just of how we interact in the modern world (“Their WhatsApp group is named ‘Birthday BBQ’ despite said barbecue taking place two years ago”), but the eternals of the human comedy: how people fool themselves, make excuses, get it wrong and keep trying anyway. We see each person’s façade, and then we get to look behind it; so they feel like people, not characters, and it’s an emotional wrench — more than once I had to set the book down for a breather — when Nicole, Jamie and Gerry reach crisis point. (Only Linda never feels fully rounded.) Even as they do stupid things, we can’t help but feel affection for them. But then, perhaps that’s why: they’re just like you and me.
At the Table by Claire Powell, Fleet, 336pp; £14.99
