The Usual Desire to Kill
Camilla Barnes. Scribner, $26.99 (256p) ISBN 978-1-6680-6283-8
Playwright Barnes combines humor with pathos in her heart-wrenching debut, the story of an aging British couple’s unhappy marriage told mainly from the perspective of their actor daughter. Miranda’s parents were born during WWII and have been together since their student days at Oxford. Dad, a retired philosophy professor, now tends to llamas, chickens, and cats at their rundown manor house in central France, where he and Mum, who got pregnant before she could finish her studies, moved after raising Miranda and her older sister, Charlotte, in England. The parents’ endless stream of bickering, “a game of stubbornness versus pedantry,” is witnessed most often by Miranda, now pushing 50, who visits regularly from Paris. She relates their bitter and witty exchanges in emails to Charlotte and in scripts, which comprise the text of the novel along with Miranda’s narration and Mum’s old letters. Miranda and Charlotte think they know their parents all too well, but the genius of the novel lies in the ways Barnes highlights how parents can never be fully known to their children, no matter how observant their children are. In Mum’s letters to her sister, for example, she reveals an affair with an American traveler during her Oxford days, the outcome of which helps to explain her acerbic nature, while Dad shares a secret of his own with Miranda’s daughter, Alice, in the form of a poignant philosophical conundrum. It’s an unforgettable story about the limits of judging others. Agent: Nicole Aragi, Aragi Inc. (Apr.)
Details
Reviewed on: 01/15/2025
Genre: Fiction
Downloadable Audio - 978-1-3985-3522-0
Downloadable Audio - 978-1-6681-1108-6
Hardcover - 978-1-3985-3519-0
Library Binding - 978-1-4205-2179-5
Paperback - 978-1-3985-3520-6