RAT

The travels of two intrepid youngsters become an unlikely journey to maturity in this engaging fifth novel from the London-based American author (The Furies, 2003 etc.).

In its primary narrative, we’re introduced to 15-year-old Celia Bonnet, affectionately dubbed “Rat” by her beautiful, wayward mother Vanessa, with whom she lives in the French Pyrénnées near the Spanish border, where Vanessa makes a living as a brocanteur working the open markets (“She buys and sells old goods”). Bonding with a friend her age (Jérôme) and a younger orphan (Morgan) adopted by the impulsive Vanessa, Rat lives an essentially outdoor, unstructured life, pumping her mom for information about the stranger who fathered her—London artist Gillem McKane, the son of famous fashion model Celia Kidd. When Vanessa’s live-in lover Thierry proves himself alarmingly unworthy of her (or anyone’s) affections, Rat and Morgan strike out for London. When this strongly imagined novel sticks closely to Rat’s brash, stoical viewpoint, it’s riveting. But when, halfway through the narrative, her experiences and perceptions are juxtaposed with those of the reintroduced Gillem, the story briefly loses conviction. Gillem’s morose fatalism, which inspires his envisioning of the Iraq War in an ambitious modern Bayeux Tapestry, is never fully credible. Parallels and contrasts to Rat’s busy imagination are nicely handled, but it’s only when Rat and he force themselves to connect, tell their separate truths and risk both the creation and the loss of intimacy, that the book comes fully alive. When Rat realizes that Vanessa needs her more than she herself needs a father, the pieces fall beautifully, movingly into place.

A mature, intelligent and unusually perceptive study of the paradoxes of belonging to others, and being oneself—Eberstadt’s best novel yet.