Idle Grounds by Krystelle Bamford review: 'immensely subtle and controlled'

Stuart Kelly finds Krystelle Bamford’s debut to be a tad unsettling, while author Lydia Millet shows again that she is a ‘contemporary genius’

Very occasionally with a novel, I get the sense while reading it that it is going to linger in some manner. It is not due to anything particularly dramatic or shocking or extravagant, in fact, quite the opposite: a premonition of something nagging and unresolved. The first time I encountered such an unsettling response to a book was The Sacred Fount, a late novel by Henry James, which I’ve subsequently re-read and never quite caught its sublime out-of-kilter-ness. It is a quality much in evidence in American-born, Scots-resident Krystelle Bamford’s extremely accomplished debut. It is not gothic, or that debased pantomime I now call Scothic, but something far more sophisticated.

It begins outside of and after the story, which is a precarious narrative position to take. The narrator begins with a slightly outré comparison to the Romanovs, a family similar in “the normal range of grubby characteristics, and while we weren’t great, I’d like your sympathy because of our humanity and also what we’ve lost”. The narrator and an undefined number of cousins are at a family gathering in the 1980s at their late grandmother’s much-reduced New England estate, and go in search of the youngest, Abi, who… well. In the narrator’s words, “honestly” – again a queasy indicator – “here is what it looked like: when she rounded the corner and out of sight, it looked like the house moved towards her rather than, you know, the other way around”.

There is a lot here; from the conspiratorial imprecation to the reader to the fuzziness of her outside the field of vision when the spatial yanking or twisting occurs. Yet this is not the first “not-right” occurrence. The children, encouraged by the oldest, Travis, have been observing “just a movement”, “a thing”, a “zip zip zip. From the treeline to the shed but not back again… you could be excused for thinking that that meant it was many different things running to the shed, but we just knew it was the same thing over and over, which was worse, even though it should have been better that there was only just one”.

Lydia Millet’s narratives have an ingeniously askance quality (Picture: Vince Bucci/Getty Images)

This is immensely subtle and controlled, with sufficient detail left out and enough poised contradiction to befuddle the mind’s eye. Although the novel later makes reference to Magic Eye books, this provides the optical smearing without the snap into focus. There is a distorting, wobbling “mantle”, a “gelatinous layer” that the children pass through, to unkempt pet graveyards, a tennis court with dog dirt appearing unnoticed and a line of “Oh Henrys”: I had to look up this defunct confectionary, but it becomes invested with the sinister air. But these disorientations operate at the level of the word-choice and simile as well. One scene has horses with legs “crashing like typewriter keys” but also an “almighty goulash of legs”. One character’s face is “like a twist of paper you might throw into a fire to help it start”.

It takes a great deal of skill to introduce features like a jockey mannequin or a majolica ashet and give them resonance but not crass symbolism, but Bamford manages. The tantalising “meaning” might come from one moment. “The human brain needs disruption, I think, and that’s why we make things. You could say that an artist, for instance, finds patterns in everything, but I think probably what an artist is really there to do is tear a big hole in the maddening patterns, to create something that is so itself that it repels everything around it. I’m all for artificiality, is what I’m saying. It’s what human beings bring to the table”. This little speech is a fulcrum, since in the course of the novel we learn that the formidable matriarch was a failed novelist who wanted her children to be “marked for success”, although they “really did their utmost to scupper their own chances in utterly idiosyncratic ways”. One of the younger brood becomes an artist, and this day, with its overtones of bacchanal, sacrifice and scapegoating, might be the necessary dark alchemy.

Lost children, self-obsessed and wilfully blind older generations and weirdness that never becomes cutesy or gross are Lydia Millet’s stock in trade, and were much in evidence in her previous novel, A Children’s Bible: like Idle Grounds the reader could never quite marry up the offspring to the adults. It was also catastrophic, and that broods over the connected short stories in Atavists. Among the throwbacks are LARPers, geriatric pornography, a madcap plan to house refugees, a poison pen letter writer whose gay victims are terrified their nemesis might be an African American child and a ghastly academic shilling “the superhuman nextness of the now”. Millet can be both caustic and indulgent about her characters, and the kaleidoscope nature of the collection forces the reader into revising opinions from page to page. Her narratives have an ingeniously askance quality, where an outlandish proposition actually conceals the tectonic tensions underneath. One character articulates the novel’s haunting feeling at the very end: “I recognize it… this terrible coldness down to the marrow of my bones” … “what is it, then?” “Just the end.” “The end of what?”. Trudy didn’t answer. “Oh, honey,” said Helen kindly. “Of everything”. Very few writers can make the apocalypse hilarious and sentimental. Millet is the kind of contemporary genius who should be at every book festival and on every creative writing course.

Idle Grounds, by Krystelle Bamford, Hutchinson Heinemann, £16.99; Atavists, by Lydia Millet, WW Norton, £19.99