Book review: The Confessions of Edward Day

WITH SATISFYINGLY DENSE LEV-els of plot, former Orange prize winner Valerie Martin's new novel is one of the best I've ever read about the actor's psyche – in this case the eponymous Edward Day, a struggling thespian in the New York of the 1970s. He and his colleagues are not so much insular as simply accepting that they belong to a special and ancient tribe, that they are destined to live life "illuminated by floodlights, enacted for the benefit of strangers".

Edward comes to New York trying to untangle the web of feelings left in the wake of his mother's suicide. He sees his vocation as "an egress from unbearable sorrow and guilt. My emotions," he notes, "were the strongest thing about me; they did battle with one another and I looked on, a helpless bystander." It's a position Edward sees as akin to that of the audience before the stage. This understanding helps make him a better actor.

One eventful weekend while hanging out with fellow actors on the Jersey Shore, Edward beds the beautiful Madeleine Delavergne. Later that night, he walks to the end of a pier, leans on a faulty railing and plummets to the sea. Caught in an icy current, he loses his bearings and struggles desperately against death. Here, as is so often the case in her novels, Martin skilfully captures the stop-time drama of the human brain processing information while in extremis. Edward is somehow able to bark out "Help!" a few times and then has the good/bad luck to be rescued by the unsavoury Guy Margate, another aspiring actor, who happens to be Edward's rival for Madeleine's affections. Guy is a better swimmer than Edward but is in every other way his inferior; he has a "thin, mirthless laugh" and an unnerving manner of observing other people like "the dead gazing upon the living".

Edward senses almost immediately that his rescuer will exact some kind of strange payment. In the Ripley-esque character of Guy, Martin introduces the sense of mounting menace she so enjoyably teased out in novels like Property (2003) and Trespass (2007), and in her collection The Unfinished Novel and Other Stories (2006). As in those books, Martin builds an ominous tension almost Hitchcockian in its trenchant and perverse knowledge about the human animal. In a Martin universe, you know you're going to get hit and you know you can't possibly see from which angle the blow will come, but the novelist makes it dark fun to guess.

In style, Martin's writing is like a great character actor who never calls attention to the flesh and blood behind the performance, whose art seems to require, or at least contain, a special kind of humility or perhaps even a desire to sidestep the limelight. Edward Day might finally bring her the recognition she deserves. Her previous novel, Trespass, which explored a suburban woman's distrust of her son's refugee lover, was a richer book. But Edward Day has its deep pleasures, particularly in the ingenious way Martin probes the sensibility of an artist while using it as a prism through which to tell a tale.

Edward Day possesses a gimlet eye for both the contributions and the eternal follies of his profession. Actors' memoirs, he wickedly notes, are usually divided into two parts – "stirring tales of my youthful artistic suffering followed by charming profiles of all the famous people who admire me." Edward points out that actors are too narcissistic to make good narrators. "Katharine Hepburn got it right," he says, "when she titled her tiresome paean to herself simply Me."

But Edward also demonstrates that an actor's wisdom can be an awesome thing. He knows that "emotions succeed each other in sequences that are often inappropriate and counterintuitive" and that "this is what polite society was created to conceal". After he is saved from drowning by Guy, Edward realises there is one emotional sequence you will never find – humiliation followed by gratitude: "If politicians could only grasp this simple precept, the world would be a much more peaceful place."