Writing a story from a child’s perspective works like a filter over a lens. Novels such as Sofie Laguna’s The Eye of the Sheep, Craig Silvey’s Jasper Jones and Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time use a younger person’s narration to process darker, adult themes and reveal the mythologies of the adult world. Jennifer Trevelyan’s debut A Beautiful Family uses a similar framing to tell an immersive yet imperfect coming-of-age mystery set inNew Zealand.
It’s 1985, and 10-year-old Alix – a tomboyish, inquisitive girl who is never without her red Walkman and Split Enz cassette tape – is on holiday with her family, who have left their Wellington home for the nearby Kāpiti Coast. Her novelist mother normally prefers secluded spots, but this time she has curiously opted for a populous beach town. Between her parents’ bickering and her older sister’s burgeoning interest in boys and alcohol, Alix has often felt invisible. This has made her a keen observer, and she understands more than people think.
At the outset, Alix befriends a 12-year-old Māori boy named Kahu with whom she soon becomes inseparable. He invites her over to his house, which is full of cooking aunties, rowdy cousins and dogs – a contrast to Alix’s loving yet somewhat siloed family. One day Kahu tells her about Charlotte, a young girl who drowned in the area a few years prior. The two children decide to search for her missing body, combing the beach and the nearby lagoon for remains. But as their investigation stretches on, other secrets begin to emerge. What is Alix’s mother doing on her long walks? And who is the strange old man next door always watching them?
Alix grasps at the truth of things, but her perspective means only the reader parses the more adult story unravelling around her. This framing is craftily handled, with Trevelyan building suspense as the underlying narratives coalesce, delving into familial ties, a child’s desire for harmony, and the pinballing of a child on the brink of adolescence. Innocence is deftly chipped away, and some unsettling revelations begin to dawn on Alix. “Now I understood that a family wasn’t a particularly solid thing,” she says. “It was a bubble purely of our own making and just like a bubble, it could burst.”
A Beautiful Family is most enriching in Trevelyan’s knack for character; Alix, Vanessa and her parents are all distinctive and familiar from the start, even with the story taking place from a single point of view. However, the novel stalls somewhat in pace and plot about halfway through, meandering into overwriting and a surfeit of detail – there are four consecutive pages on Alix’s Walkman, for example. The novel’s imagery also veers from tactile clarity (“the lagoon, flat and quiet as a bath”) to lines a bit sensorially inert. (“The soup had a dusty taste, like the inside of a long unopened cupboard.”)
There’s also a curious undercurrent of racial microaggressions. Alix’s mother says that “Chinese people tend to look alike”. A school friend of Vanessa’s, Crystal, mentions a boy with mixed parents has skin with the “perfect mix”. And when Alix is invited to Kahu’s house for lunch, her mother becomes overly concerned about whether there’s enough food. Trevelyan handles these inclusions delicately, and some help evoke the flawed nature of her characters. But though they appear to build towards something – an evocation of internalised prejudices, of casual discrimination, of a white child’s recognition of cultural difference – they ultimately never really say anything impactful.
By the novel’s end, Alix and Kahu, having spent the summer playing detective, suddenly stumble across a much darker discovery. Treveylan pulls some of her threads taut while leaving others loose – and yet the secrets she does reveal are predictable and only end up undercutting her otherwise immersive story. Indeed, A Beautiful Family is a charming debut, bringing life to Tolstoy’s adage that every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, but it gets mired in what turns out to be a lacklustre mystery. Hopefully, Trevelyan’s next work will lean more on her evident strengths.
A Beautiful Family by Jennifer Trevelyan is out now in Australia (Allen & Unwin, $32.99), UK (Pan Macmillan, £16.99,£15.29 on the Guardian Bookshop) and the US (Penguin Random House, US$28)