Homemaking for the Down-at-Heart by Finuala Dowling (Kwela)
This is Finuala Dowling’s third novel (the first two were What Poets Need and Flyleaf) and by now her readers will recognise that her fiction has its own special flavour, achieved by an alchemy of wit, irony, acuity, Âcommon sense and desperation.
Margot is the central figure in the now familiar setting of Kalk Bay, living with her elderly mother, Zoe, and her daughter, Pia. Dowling acknowledges some elements of autobiography in the novel’s dedication to her own mother, Eve van der Byl, a well-known radio personality, whose decline into Alzheimer’s she has already visited in Notes from the Dementia Ward, her 2008 book of poems.
Those who are familiar with her work will recognise elements from previous work and her life, now skilfully fictionalised.
In Homemaking for the Down-at-Heart, Zoe is remembered for her popular and irreverent book on household management, which had the same title.
In younger days Zoe and her close friend, Esther, co-wrote this early self-help book from which Margot remembers some sane, often outrageous, advice on how to survive things such as parenting and housekeeping — “the whole damn catastrophe” (to quote Zorba the Greek).
Great clarity and sadness
From the snippets given, it seems more poetic and a good deal funnier than anything in the Alice B Toklas cook book or HildaÂgonda Duckitt’s Diary of a Cape Housewife. Would that Zoe’s book actually existed — I would have to buy it immediately for its feisty pursuit of comfort and grace.
But Zoe, when we first meet her in 2006, is in the early stages of Alzheimer’s, where the words she needs have “gone away behind a hedge”.
Increasingly dependent on the members of the household and her carer, she nevertheless has moments of great clarity and sadness. She apologises to Margot for “the long hell we are about to enter” and says of herself that she has been “usurped” and “betrayed”. She thinks of killing herself and suggests ways. For all her frailty she still has flashes of the clever, dignified, intellectual and elegant person she was. She is loved by all, including a decrepit dog in whose decline we see a foreshadowing of her fate.
Margot is a radio presenter, with a late-late phone-in programme on which she discusses some tough questions, such as “What’s it all about then, life —?” Her daughter, Pia, is on the threshold of puberty — still longing to play and equally longing to start growing up.
Also resident in the house are two men, Mr Morland and Curtis. Mr Morland, a son of Zoe’s friend, Esther, is a psychic with enough paying clients to make a living from this unusual talent.
Dowling does not cast any aspersions on this modus vivendi but she shows him to be hopelessly unhouse-trained, blissfully unaware of his own self-absorption in his search for a girlfriend. However, he is kind and helpful with Zoe.
This tolerant kindness to Zoe also manifests in Curtis, who is Margot’s lover. He is a farmer from KwaZulu-Natal who has abandoned his ancient father to cope on his own, while he consorts with Margot. He makes himself useful by fixing things, being fatherly to Pia and doing good deeds in the neighbourhood. A thoughtful and considerate man, he is also lean, manly and self-disciplined.
But he has a flaw — he believes in the “irrefutable science of human biology”, by which he means that men are programmed to lust after many women. He assumes and hopes that Margot knows this.
Brilliant and excruciating
The third male character is Margot’s ex-husband, Leroy, father of Pia. An actor and stand-up comic whose star is fading, he does gigs at the local Brass Bell pub. Here Dowling outdoes herself — these skits are brilliant and excruciating, like Leroy himself. He visits the house and unsettles his former family and Curtis especially, who finds his assumption of familiarity with Pia and Margot “insinuating” and “leg-liftingly territorial”.
The comings and goings of these two men take place against Margot’s caring for her mother and her daughter, and Dowling takes a long, considering look at the two of them. Even the Ken doll (boy Barbie) is lightly and somewhat ambiguously disparaged. True to form, he is slightly damaged but sits there, “his broken leg stretched out manfully before him”.
Margot’s view of herself is given early on. She says: “She didn’t want to be this full of spit, hiss and hit” and she resolves she will practise being nice, “[to]speak in the elided language of obituaries”. Her daughter, an astute observer of her mother, responds to one such evasive kindness with “Where did that come from?”
We observe the happenings at the house over three years, skipping lightly to move along. It is a swift read, but full of complexity and challenge. Margot’s most scary moment comes after her mother is no longer there in any sense but in memory, but it is still Zoe she evokes in a situation both tricky and ridiculous, involving Curtis and Leroy.
A favourite passage is this, from Zoe’s homemaking book: “There is always the possibility that depression can be cured with porridge, especially if you cover it with a crust of sticky brown sugar. Despite its name, a porringer isn’t the ideal serving vessel. You need a wide, shallow bowl so that the sugar or honey melts over the biggest possible area. The bowl should have a generous lip for resting the spoon in moments of thought between mouthfuls.”
Somehow this seems to capture what it’s all about, or at least to suggest a way to keep going.
This graceful and thoughtful novel is darker than the previous two and for that reason deeper. Dowling, who won the Olive Schreiner Award for Notes from the Dementia Ward, compacts many hours of musing into a simple story form.