Conformist, bored and ripe for seduction

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If you haven’t read The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton, on which Segal’s debut novel is based, it’s possibly all to the good. For if you have, you might spend so much time comparing the two, you miss out on what a terrific book The Innocents is in its own right.

So let’s pretend Edith Wharton never existed and turn our attention to Segal’s small, interlinked Jewish community nestled in north London’s Hampstead Garden Suburb. The residents are fearsomely protective of their reputations and live their lives according to the community’s collective opinion. They may be lawyers, doctors and scientists , but what really matters is who’s wearing what and who’s getting married to whom.

Our hero is young Adam, a Jewish mother’s dream. Any mother’s dream. He is kind; he is a lawyer; he is dutiful towards his mum and crazy sister. His lovely fiancée, the rosy-cheeked Rachel, has clean hair, bakes brownies and visits her granny.

Adam doesn’t realise how bored he is with all this until the reappearance of Rachel’s pornographically hot, bad, mad cousin Ellie. She blows back into Golders Green after years in Manhattan, which she has now fled following a sex scandal. Ellie opens the eyes of straight, prudish Adam to the limitations of his cosy but Identikit life. “Why,” he frets, “did they have to chug along every benchmark, every occasion, every ceremony as if their lives were one long snaking predetermined conga line?” A hideous crisis of faith, love and family ensues.

Segal is affectionate towards this — her own — community, while also being excellently mean about its petty obsessions and weird habits.

Her prose is ageless, sexless and never hits a bum note. At times it is charmingly, knowingly dainty to reflect the story’s origins. The sentence “Jewish men are widely known to be uxorious in all the most advantageous ways” could almost be the start of a long-lost Austen novel, let alone anything by Wharton. I’m half-tempted to read the original, but I fear it wouldn’t measure up.

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