A novel that visits another country: the past

In the Fold
By Rachel Cusk
Little, Brown, 262 pp., $23.95

Within every great comic writer lies the certainty of tragedy -- else why bother to go after the big guffaws? The British writer Rachel Cusk has this dark knowledge well within her grasp: It's all over ''In the Fold," her fourth novel, from the epigraph, which belongs to Liubov's wrenching passage on hope from ''The Cherry Orchard." Still, Cusk's voice is so finely calibrated -- so uproarious and devastatingly precise -- that you're willing to forget for a while that things are bound to turn out badly. Her grasp of the vast intricacies of human relations has the cool equanimity of George Eliot, but the lens through which she views the world is pure Evelyn Waugh.

''In the Fold" is, among other things, a novel about class and privilege -- about the masquerades, obstacles, and desires we create or stumble into and then form entire lives around. The narrator of the novel is a dreamy young fellow named Michael, a public-interest lawyer who lives in Bath with his angry, cockeyed wife, Rebecca, and their 3-year-old son, Hamish, who has responded to his parents' troubles by making bell-like noises. But these current-day trappings are merely the springboard for Michael's Nick Carraway-esque return to a coastal enclave of his youth -- a place on the Bristol Channel, near Doniford, so established and presumptuous that it's known to locals and family friends as ''Egypt." Michael went there first while he was at university, when the sister of his roommate, Adam Hanbury, invited him to her 18th-birthday party. ''At Egypt," the invitation announced. ''Carriages at Dawn."

Thus begins his and our introduction to the Hanburys -- a madcap sheep-farming family of old money and treacherous connections that comes across like the Addams family with scones and a coat of arms. Adam's sister, Caris, is a lovely sprite who appears barefooted wearing a crown of ivy for her party; brother Brendon is an odd fellow who hides out in the chicken house. Their parentage is a motley assortment of Paul, the affable pater familias; Vivian, the melodramatic stepmother who insists on cooking odd breakfasts for everyone; and Audrey, their first mum, who cheerfully pops in for her alimony check. ''This is our home," Adam announces blithely, about their strangely harmonious circumstances. ''It's the place that matters, not the people in it." When Vivian makes an outlandish, drunken pass at Michael in front of her husband, Paul smiles and says to his young guest, ''Is it good for you up here? Do you like it? Not everybody does."

So Egypt is a foreign country, far from Bath and from Michael's sorrowful, uneasy marriage, and when Adam invites his old roommate up to the farm to help with the lambing, Michael sees it as an opportunity to escape Rebecca's perplexing rage and his own ennui. Hamish in tow, he heads back to the place where he first glimpsed ''an intimation of the notion of privilege" -- his West Egg, where confidence and eccentricity seemed to supplant the need for sanity itself.

Still, 16 years have passed since those carriages at sunrise, and Michael is less easily swayed. Adam has become a strait-laced surveyor, living in a middle-class development that Paul, from the bluffs of Egypt, can look down upon in every sense. The great father is in the hospital for prostate cancer, but no one can summon the wherewithal to go visit him. Caris lives in an all-female commune, and Vivian is still cooking her scary eggs and mumbling about the sacrifices she's made. Equally ominous changes have come to the land: The farmer next door is selling his acreage to a developer, and when Adam gets a look at the farm's books, he gets the first real confirmation that the past was illusory for a reason.

Michael, too, has had to face this wising up: the idea that his memories ''wandered around the occupied spaces, as mournful as ghosts." But for all its elegant similes and dazzling satire, ''In the Fold" can't really be summed up by the follies of the Hanburys. It's a novel about loss and illusion, hard truths made bearable in a shroud of humor. Cusk hides her brilliantly serious cameos within her mock family portrait, so that they seem all the more somber and enlightening: the lambing scenes, with Egypt's ewes overseen by a woman who gives not a whit for human privilege; Michael's violin, probably the purest notion of self-definition he possesses. His love for Hamish -- a beautiful, barrel-faced child whose long silences give him a comic Churchillian air -- is easily the finest and most overlooked point in the story.

''In the Fold" is a story where you want more to happen than it does, mostly because of those glorious sentences and insights. Cusk's is a world where physical space -- natural and man-made -- reflects the terrors and epiphanies of its witnesses, where wit is a stand-in for cruelty or emptiness, and silence is a tolling bell even more incongruous than Hamish's wistful chimes. Eventually the entire façade of Egypt begins to crack; there are so many secrets hiding within that even the dogs seem sinister. What's left is the story that Michael was trying to flee -- a life in Bath where his own Georgian home half-broke in two before he left, where he has to return to unravel what he perceives, sadly and truthfully, as ''the business of human encounter."

Cusk is preposterously young to be this smart -- she was born in 1967 -- and while one is tempted to give her all kinds of advice camouflaged as critical appraisal, it's probably best to get out of her way. She is unbelievably funny and perceptive and, one hopes, unstoppable. ''In the Fold" is a deceptively small novel with a few perfect moments. Its elegiac knell is Michael's realization of what Egypt represented, exquisite lie that it was: ''That my life was going to expand and expand and become beautiful." That's an old confusion of access with hope, and it's testament to Michael's character that he figures out the difference before it's too late. Gatsby never did.

Gail Caldwell is chief book critic of the Globe. She can be reached at caldwell@globe.com.