Claire Messud’s ambitious and compelling novel covers the lives of three generations of a Franco-Algerian family. Here are some of the events that are not described in it: the Algerian war of independence, as a result of which the Cassar family lose their home and national identity; the two years the family’s most promising scion spends as a student in Paris, during which he endures something (racist bullying? Mental collapse?) that blights his adult life; his sister’s broken-hearted suicide attempt; an alcoholic’s hard-won recovery; the courtship of a couple who have been held up throughout the novel as exemplars of married love and yet whose relationship – as we discover only in the final pages – was shockingly transgressive. Any of these developments could have provided more than enough material for the plot of a lesser novel. Here they take place off stage.
Shakespeare’s Jaques, from As You Like It, declared that the “strange eventful history” of human life has seven “acts” or “ages”. Messud has taken her structure as well as her title from his famous speech. Her story is a drama and she tells it, as dramatists do, in episodes, each separated from the next by a decade or so, leaving the in-between parts of the narrative to be inferred or recalled or sometimes foreshadowed, always remaining subsidiary to the immediate onstage events.
