PRODIGAL

Two siblings, taking care of their dying father, must face the true extent of the dysfunction in their lives.

The title of Lambert’s novel is ironic: The prodigal son returning to the fold here is Jeremy Eldritch, a middle-aged gay British expat living in Paris who writes “soft-core romantic porn” under a nom de plume and who has recently ended a complicated love affair with a Parisian man. When Jeremy’s older sister, Rachel, calls to tell him their father, their sole remaining parent, is dying, Jeremy reluctantly returns to the family home in England. There, he must deal with Rachel’s contempt for his life in France and with the unexpected presence of two South Asian caretakers overseeing his father’s care. Once he arrives, he realizes there is a great deal he never knew about his family’s past, until it is uncovered in surprising and uncomfortable ways. Alternating between Jeremy’s and Rachel’s perspectives, Lambert intertwines the siblings’ fraught reunion with glimpses backward through the past. We see Jeremy’s early years as an erotica writer and as a young gay man, both of which induce in Jeremy shame and pleasure: “he’d been born to blush and skulk.” Through Rachel’s eyes, we see her bafflement at her brother’s aloofness and at the long-ago dissolution of her marriage to an adulterous husband. As their father lives out his final days, the siblings learn that the question of who we are as individuals, and as families, is always in flux, exposed equally to dissolution or redemption. Though the arc of this domestic drama may be familiar, even occasionally verging on soap operatic, Lambert is a writer full of wit and poignance, especially in portraying the toxicity of White middle-class British society.

Lambert explores the tangle of family dynamics with characteristic panache.