Diana Evans, _A House for Alice_

THE NOVEL BEGINS with a bang, a tour de force chapter of free indirect discourse from the point of view of Cornelius Pitt, a crotchety, irritable old Englishman living among piles of papers in the vicinity of which, despite multiple warnings from his caretakers, he continues to smoke tobacco...well, the long and short of it is that the reader realizes before Cornelius does that his place is on fire, and Cornelius does not survive the novel's first chapter.

Things settle down in the next few chapters, as Evans gives us a chapter-apiece survey of Cornelius's estranged wife and three daughters. We seem to be in familiar contemporary British novel territory. Then, right at the end of Part One, we get another chapter from Cornelius's point of view...as a ghost.

Whoa!

By and large, A House for Alice is domestic realism with a salting of State-of-England (the Grenfell fire, Brexit), within hailing distance of Zadie Smith novels like NW or Swing Time in its portrait of contemporary London. Alice is the estranged wife of the dead but uncannily active Cornelius; the house is one she wants to have built in Nigeria so she can return to spend her twilight years there. Her daughters disagree on how good an idea this is, but the novel ends with Alice about to fly out of Gatwick, her house built and her dream on the cusp of realization. Her daughters and grandchildren have made various kinds of progress in resolving their own issues.

All enjoyable enough, but I wondered about the novel's brush with the supernatural, which seems to involve a grievous sin on Cornelius's part, for which some kind of reckoning is due. I wasn't quite sure how this fit in with a story that otherwise had its feet on the ground, so to speak.