Charlotte Mendelson’s four previous novels are clever, funny, ferociously observant and unapologetic about their origin in and passion for a particular corner of the bourgeoisie. Mostly set in London and north Oxford, looking towards Hungary in 2013’s brilliant Almost English, her fiction dissects the lives and minds of families who own messy Victorian houses, send children to Oxbridge and manage transgressive romantic lives. In the tradition of novels of middle-class dysfunction – Austen, Flaubert, Woolf and their descendants – the personal is political but politics simmer in the background: Mendelson’s version of England is a safe enough place for her characters to focus on domestic and professional life.
The Exhibitionist has been longlisted for the Women’s prize. It opens bravely with Ray Hanrahan, patriarch and painter, who lives in a large house in north London amid the chaos of “books everywhere, wizened tangerines and cold coffee”, declaring that “Tolstoy was an idiot.” “We’re famously happy, aren’t we? Aren’t we? And totally unique.” Ray believes himself unique as an artist and his wife and children unique in their devotion to him. Partly because fiction is almost by definition uninterested in the unique – we read to learn and see patterns – the novel turns on Ray being wrong. His family’s devotion makes him happy, or would if there were ever enough of it, and other people’s happiness doesn’t concern him because he doesn’t believe in other people. Meanwhile, Ray’s wife Lucia, also an artist, is lying on her studio floor, ignoring the phone because it will be her gallerist calling with good news for her, which will upset Ray: “He tends his grudge like a sacred lamp.” Lucia has spent decades sabotaging her own career in order to be “the perfect assistant, honoured to be elected to serve the genius”. Having learned all this in the opening pages, the reader spends the rest of the book wanting her to take that call. (She does. It’s big.)
