Tennysonesque approach to grief

TENNYSON'S In Memoriam is the most sustained, lyrical and lachrymose elegy in English.

111224 review kirsten tranter

TENNYSON'S In Memoriam is the most sustained, lyrical and lachrymose elegy in English.

It makes Milton's Lycidas look like a Hollywood tear. The poem, inspired by the death of Tennyson's Cambridge friend Arthur Hallam, took 17 years to complete. "Sad mechanic exercise" is how the poet described the method of its composition.

Tennyson originally called the poem The Way of the Soul. He came to see its 133 cantos as an exploration of the passage of grief, from initial trauma to final acceptance.

Kirsten Tranter, who knows her English poets, chose nicely when she picked a phrase from In Memoriam for the title and a whole stanza for the epigraph of her second novel. Not just because A Common Loss is similarly concerned with grief -- relating as it does the aftermath of a car accident that robs a tight-knit group of American college friends of their charismatic linchpin -- but because the setting and milieu of the novel could not be further removed from Tennyson's gas-lit, God-haunted world.

Instead, we have Tennyson's grave formality employed to describe a trip undertaken by four still-young men to Las Vegas in the present day: an annual hedonists' reunion that, in the year following its fifth member's sudden death, becomes something of a wake. As these characters stumble through the blinking neon of the global capital of postmodern inauthenticity readers could hardly imagine a more lucid, knowing investigation of what contemporary American existence looks like. Yet the voice Tranter grants her first-person narrator Elliot, an academic whose specialty is Renaissance literature, is so subtly correct and self-consciously ruminative that we come to share his melancholy alienation from the world.

This clever approach -- rigorous literary style as a means of insulating narrative from the shallow and fraudulent reality it describes -- has been used before, to great effect, by Donna Tartt, whose 1992 campus thriller The Secret History managed the nigh-impossible task of being highbrow and popular simultaneously. That Tranter seeks to emulate such register-juggling without following too exactly in the American writer's footsteps is clearly stated early on. "This isn't going to be one of those stories about a suburban boy seduced into a picaresque world of wealth and charm by a group of high-class eccentrics," says Elliot, surely alluding to Tartt's debut:

I loved those stories, and in many ways that experience was what I wished for at college. But by the time of Dylan's death, the group was out of tune with everything else that seemed important to my life, everything I aspired to. I told myself I didn't like any of them much any more.

The narrator's mature disenchantment, then, is the subject of A Common Loss, making it closer to Tartt's underrated second novel, The Little Friend, which also deals with the disclosure of long-held secrets.

For example, Tranter's fiction begins with a bang: the account of a car accident (not the fatal event itself, rather a precursor crash) in which a vehicle carrying the much younger group swerves to avoid a deer on a dark road and overturns. Cameron, the driver, is drunk and is saved from legal trouble only by the relatively sober and quick-thinking Dylan.

Although this brief preface is recounted in dreamy retrospect, it transmits quantities of information: Dylan's talent for problem-solving and his innate command of persons and events. That narrator Elliot's deep love for his friend is at odds with his sense of outsider status in the larger group is unpacked in a matter of paragraphs.

But it is the sense of discombobulation occasioned by the accident that is most important. Because as the quartet of boon companions gathers in Vegas a decade after this first accident, still mourning Dylan who died only months before, Elliott is obliged to renegotiate not only his relationship to the remainder of the newly configured gang but also his own memories of Dylan who, we learn, is not the person we thought he was.

Or, rather, he was far more than the person the group presumed him to be: more dangerous, more controlling and more ruthless, even from beyond the grave. As with Patricia Highsmith, another writer with whom Tranter has been compared, the pleasures here are wrung from the wrong-footing of characters, none of whom is entirely likable or wholly who they seem. Their discomfort and comeuppance keep the narrative humming along.

The excitement of concealment and exposure -- the bread and butter of genre thrills -- is not all that holds the reader, however. A Common Loss is built from richer, more complex stuff. It is a tale of social artifice that unfolds in a city of mirrors, and a story of betrayal that nonetheless unfolds using Tennyson's bleakly authentic language of loss.

Geordie Williamson is The Australian's chief literary critic and winner of the 2011 Pascall Prize for criticism.

A Common Loss
By Kirsten Tranter
Fourth Estate, 368pp, $29.99