Book review: Newborn, by Kerry Hudson

Charting the process of bringing a new life into the world, from yearning to conception, birth and its aftermath, Kerry Hudson’s new book also feeds into the current discourse on class, writes Stuart Kelly

Cover one eye with one palm and you can catch a glimpse of a trend anywhere. One recent example has not yet been baptised but suffice to say it is concerned with deprivation, exclusion and penury. “Pov-lit” seems inappropriate. But there is something going when such titles as Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart, Maggie & Me by Damian Barr, Motherwell by Deborah Orr, Poverty Safari by Darren McGarvey and A Working Class State Of Mind by Colin Burnett are all receiving attention. It is neither exclusively Scottish (Chavs by Owen Jones, Estates by Lynsey Hanley) nor modern (a personal favourite, Arthur Morrison’s 1896 A Child Of The Jago). And of course there is the form’s laureate, James Kelman.

The volume here is by Kerry Hudson. Her career is interesting in that there is “home” recognition courtesy of the Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust First Book Award for Tony Hogan Bought Me An Ice-cream Float Before He Stole My Ma; then Thirst which won the Prix Femina étranger. These novels were followed by the non-fiction Lowborn, a rather thrawn book which seemed to goad “I write about poverty and know whereof I speak”. Now we have Newborn. There is always a degree of anxiety about a writer given to self-excavation; how much pain precisely is there to be siphoned? It is a discomfort enhanced by the sententious tricolon as a subtitle: “Running away, breaking from the past, building a new family”. When you think about it, that would suffice for Oliver Twist or Watership Down.

Newborn is divided into three sections or trimesters – Life, Love and Home; and as you would expect it charts yearning, conceiving, birth and its aftermath. As such it aligns with another spiral of similarities, alongside Chitra Ramaswamy’s Expecting, Hollie McNish’s Nobody Told Me, Matresense by Lucy Jones, Anne Enright’s Making Babies and Marianne Levy’s Don’t Forget To Scream.

The narrative arc is relatively simple. Hudson has met Peter who may be the hitherto thought mythical One. She also is experiencing the twinge for a something, an alteration, she had never considered seriously before. Clock’s a-ticking. She has had many experiences living around the world but this is irreversible. They decide to relocate to Prague where there is many a slip ’twixt cup and lip, and the venture / gain homeostasis may or may not be hooey.

There is a deeper moral question, and it can be approached sideways by asking if Newborn is a standalone book. Are the evocations of a wretched and painfully random childhood here on these pages, or are we reliant on having already read them in Lowborn? Never having known a positive maternal role model, is Hudson damned by determinism to perpetuate similar mistakes, to, as Larkin put it, “fill you with the faults they had / and add some extra just for you”? Since I am a wry melancholic I prefer the quip of father to son, “You won’t make the same mistakes. You’ll make your own ones”.

One problem here is that the analysis of class seems too thin. More certainly could have been done with the disparity between the backgrounds of Kerry and Peter. More ought to have been done on class mobility. If you are in the arts, living in Bangkok, Tblisi, Berlin and so forth, if you swoon at your child’s appetite for gyoza but retain a totemic love for MacDonald’s, then what class actually are you? (I am absolutely not advocating a credit check on people buying truffles). Class is not a singular indicator, not a bar code. It is not a bank balance. There are indicators here of a new discourse about what class means. Both are throwaway lines. On contemporary Glasgow, she praises a “Yiddish, queer, anarchist, ‘pay what you can’ café” and elsewhere exonerates a Mormon for having a trans rights flag. Might class nowadays be a vector of socially acceptable thinking? The other gave me a sense of chill: “For me, the war in Ukraine unfolded on Twitter”. Better, I suppose, than unfolding from a drone barrage through the temple. Again, an oddity: there are Facebook groups, Google Translate, Netflix, podcasts and suchlike, but with the exception of childhood classics and her own work, there are very few books.

Newborn seems a bit of a reputational placeholder. Some of the early raptures are a bit de trop. “I have never seen Peter be anything less than kind, gentle and excessively thoughtful to every human and animal he encountered. He’d rescue earthworms from Hackney pavements and walk them to the park.” SPOILER WARNING: this apotheosis of sensibility does not extend to insufficiently praising your partner’s article which was “unnecessarily pointed”. And if the personal pronoun – “my child” were used any more I might well point out the first person plural – our – exists. Newborns – well, at least they grow up.

Newborn, by Kerry Hudson, Chatto & Windus, £18.99