Brothers with the blues

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You don’t have to be a depressive to enjoy Tim Lott’s latest book but it will help. Having suffered a bout of the blues, it was fascinating to read his latest novel, Under the Same Stars, knowing that had I read it some years ago much of it would have bored or infuriated me. The flatness of the narrator’s voice, its sympathy with the protagonist’s mournful and detached take on the world, would have driven me up the wall. But now, that same voice — which makes the whole novel sound like a slow and slightly pained exhalation — I found to be engaging, honest, insightful and compelling.

The novel is about Salinger Nash, a middle-aged man suffering with his moods who takes a road trip across America with his brother, Carson. Based on a similar trip Lott made with his own brother, it depicts well the awkward fumblings of grown men reaching out for a relationship with each other. But what it does best is portray the state of mind of a depressive. On the first page is an acute description that rang a massive bell with me, and will do so for many others, of Salinger waking up and feeling a “raw sensation, something like an emotion, located around the wall of his sternum. It was close to being anger but more passive, facing inward as well as outward. It was a nexus of heat, and of hurt, and of friction — as if the lining of his innermost self, long wounded, had been poorly cauterised, leaving an ever tender scar. The scar was stitched with guilt — a guilt unattached to any sin that he could remember committing”.

The relationship between the brothers is beautifully drawn. Pitting Salinger’s middle-class north London liberal values against Carson’s Christian evangelism and Middle American belief in active citizenry and the death penalty, Lott cleverly lays bare the limitations of both. Believing that “revenge is a kind of grace” and advocating lethal injections for murderers, Carson nonetheless throws himself into the relief effort following Hurricane Katrina. Salinger, horrified by his brother’s politics, is mesmerised by the obesity and outlandishness of the people he encounters in the US.

The two go in search of their estranged father, also living in America, but the tale has a refreshing lack of resolution. Skeletons fall out of closets and old relationships are renewed, but none of the fraying loose ends of Salinger’s fraught condition is tied up. When it’s all over, he is left confronting the same mess as before only with a bit more knowledge. His pessimism never wanes. He is none the wiser about his brother’s faith, nor does he understand America. The melancholy that afflicts him remains as mysterious as ever.

The absence of a narrative arc that brings about a change in character does makes the tone of the novel almost one-note but it gives the story integrity. I found its quiet sadness very touching, and the mood stayed with me for some time after.

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