Front-loaded 'Tomorrow' founders at the finish
Tomorrow
By Graham Swift
Knopf, 255 pp., $23.95
In life and literature alike, coyness is generally less a virtue than it is a means to an end. "Artful" might be a classier word for the same trait, albeit with a craftier set of motives. So let's just call "Tomorrow" an artful novel - one that postulates a doom-and-gloom secret from its opening pages, then spends the bulk of the story playing the reader like a string quartet.
English writer Graham Swift is no stranger to elegant acts of the world unfolding; in "Last Orders," he assumed a cacophony of such discrete and memorable voices - four guys on their way to spread a friend's ashes - that the novel, which won the coveted Booker Prize, was heart-wrenching in its quiet revelations. In seven previous novels and a collection of stories, he has written with supple confidence and grace, preferring the large-hearted complexities of the inner life as his tableau. And certainly "Tomorrow" possesses the same level of skill and emotional depth in its narrative, a first-person soliloquy unfolding one night in 1995. But in a story where one voice has to carry the show, the novel's premise and delivery are its sine qua non - it's hard to love a book, no matter how eloquently conceived, whose punch line is suspect or overwrought.
I'm in the reviewer's dilemma here of not wanting to give away the gist of the story (though it should be said that I figured it out pretty quickly). So what follows will contain no outright spoilers, just a duck-and-weave summation of Swift's narrative tricks. The narrator of the novel is Paula Hook, who's spending a fitful night in bed with Mike, her husband of 25 years, sleeping next to her. It is a week or so after the 16th birthday of their twins, Kate and Nick, and the Hooks have long ago decided that tomorrow will be the day - the possibly "monstrous" day that they'll tell the kids, and change life as they know it forever. They've gone to bed one last time in the old, innocent world, and made love "in a special, a poignant, a farewell way." Now Kate, lying awake, is giving the twins the background of the whole life story, and we, as hostage audience, get to listen to her until the dawn.
If one can forget the premise of the novel, its darkly guarded secrets (other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?), then the background retrospective of "Tomorrow" is often a gentle and evocative story: Paula, née Campbell, was the daughter of a High Court judge; she fell in love with Mike when he crawled into her bed one night in the free-and-easy 1960s. These days the Hooks live on the classy fringes of London and have a house in France, but in their early years together, Mike was a biologist who studied snails, Paula an idealistic art historian. Living World Books, the science publishing house that Mike owns, has given them a comfortable life, as has the prestigious art house where Paula works. Mike was born in 1945 while his father was a prisoner of war; Paula's dad, who died just before the twins were born, was married three times - she still doesn't speak to her mother. "Tomorrow" follows these relatively bland domestic dramas through decades and chapters, always alluding, in Paula's stricken, nostalgic voice, to what tomorrow will hold - to the day when, once all is revealed, the twins may indeed decide to banish them both.
From the predawn calamitous tone of Paula's musings, one gets the feeling from the outset of "Tomorrow" that these two are going to turn out to be serial killers - that or something equally devastating, a blight upon the past that can never be righted or forgiven. But the actual skeleton in the parental chifforobe, while significant, is so well intentioned - so understandable and, let's face it, commonplace - that the reader is more annoyed than intrigued by the time it's revealed. Whenever a writer decides to make a momentous disclosure the hook of the story (and plenty of puns are made about the Hooks), it's a tricky proposition: You have to get some bang for your buck, or the whole scaffolding of the novel starts to feel a bit flimsy. The real risk is in alienating the reader. By the time Paula starts describing her sexual athletics with her husband (remember, the entire narrative is a sort of open letter to her children), you're ready to chuck the whole story: "And yet I thought," muses Paula, "even as I straddled your father . . ." Mo-ommmmm! Stop it!
In the extraordinary "Last Orders," Swift beautifully rendered four gruff and distinct male voices; he is less successful with the tear-drenched meanderings of a 49-year-old female. Paula is sentimental most of the time (my darlings, my angels, she repeatedly calls the twins), but is unsparing and off-tone in too many other places - in one typical male-sounding descriptor, she refers to two elderly women as "old biddies." The cumulative effect of this dissonance is that you begin not to trust what Paula says, and subsequently you don't care much, either.
Which is obviously not the result she is seeking, given the monumental occasion tomorrow holds. There are a couple of passages toward the end of the novel, when Paula is finishing up her memories, that hold all the emotional depth and magnitude that Swift possesses - particularly one day at the beach when the twins were small, when the perilous cost of human attachment very nearly came due. Such moments are as emotionally piercing as any news Paula may mean to share. But they come far too seldom in "Tomorrow" - which, given the thin soup of its revelation, might as well be called "Whenever."
Gail Caldwell is chief book critic of the Globe. She can be reached at caldwell@globe.com. 