A Decent World

I loved Ellen Hawley's 'Other People Manage' so was excited to read 'A Decent World' which offers a similarly compassionate and well-observed exploration of troubled families and relationships.

Summer Dawidowitz was brought up by her loving grandmother, Josie, a blacklisted Communist teacher and activist. The novel begins with Josie's death after Summer has spent the last year caring for her. We follow Summer as she tries to forge her own path, honour her grandmother's legacy and re-evaluate various relationships, including with her mother Zanne who abandoned Summer in order to pursue her singing career, with Josie's wealthy estranged brother David Freund, and with the polyamorous revolutionary 'Household' to which Summer belongs.

The wisdom and insight with which Hawley writes about relationships and interactions frequently reminded me of Anne Tyler or Elizabeth Strout, though sometimes, particularly in this novel, there is more of an acerbic edge to her observations, for instance when describing Summer's only male housemate, Zac: "The dealings between the women took place in the background, in a language he couldn't quite catch - one he didn't stop talking long enough to learn." Hawley also captures the simultaneously fragile and unbreakable bonds that can exist between members of a family, particularly when the nucleus of that family has gone. "We would have liked to like each other better," Summer remarks at one point.

What I loved most about this novel, though, was its nuanced depiction of idealism and disillusionment. Josie and her husband Sol, Summer and 'The Household' all fervently hope for a fairer world, yet must contend on a daily basis with doubt and disappointment. As Josie 's son Jack comments, "It's feeling like the whole world disagrees with you. It's scary as hell. And you lose. Over and over again, you lose. Things do change, but never enough and it always feels like you're losing. The power's on the other side." And when Summer and her housemates take Josie to visit an Occupy camp and tell her, "This is the revolution", her response is "It's going to take more than this." The ways different characters find to live with these constant feelings of disappointment drive much of the novel, and Hawley's poignant conclusion, which takes us back to Josie's perspective, reminded me of another great frustrated idealist, Dorothea Brooke from 'Middlemarch'

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for sending me an ARC of this perceptive and quietly moving novel to review.