From May To October
by Jennifer Lash
Hamish Hamilton
6.95 pounds in the U.K.
____________________________

A Review by Bruce Arnold
The Irish Times
c. 1980
____________________________
 

                                              JENNIFER LASH'S novel, "From May To October" is a story about family love.  Even in its measure, free from any conventional climax of drama, it recounts the pursuit of art by a woman painter, aided by her husband and children.

            The Lamberts have five children; they have a large house in the country; the husband runs a bookshop in the local town, and it is a struggle; the wife runs the family, and tries to paint, and that is also a struggle.  They do not mess each other about, they don't have hysterics, the children generally behave well.  Other relations waver between behaving well and being censorious.

            The main problem is money, but it is not really a problem because the vitality of domestic love perpetually diminishes the corrosive force of the inevitable shortages which ordinary life brings about.  The benign intrusion of a family friend, Giles, makes it possible for Caroline, the heroine, to go away to France to paint and to prepare for an exhibition.

          While it is clear that Gile's fondness could well lead to an affair between himself and Caroline, it does not; again, because the general and pervasive strength of family love simply thwarts the frail and unrealisable duplicity.

          If all of this suggests a narrative that just coasts along, then to some extent this is the truth.  The narrative, in the author's eyes, lacks importance; so much is this so that the main potential climax to the story -- the exhibition by which the book's  heroine should prove herself as a painter -- vanishes in the closing pages, once again overwhelmed by the natural force of family love.

            Nevertheless, there is drama, and it is contained much more in the objective observation of truth about human behaviour than about any twist or turn in the actual events.  The author has really turned fiction on its head, making the quite ordinary fate of her Caroline and her Michael a vehicle for Chekovian philosophising.

            To such moments, Jennifer Lash applies a quiet precision.  On art, on achievement, on "finding a way without fighting," she wants to discover an intensity which is not possible when describing the normal struggle of existence.  And she does this with a penetrating truthfulness which compensates for the flatness of the story.

            This is in the sharpest contrast with an earlier novel, "Get Down There And Die," partly set in Ireland, where she lived for a time.  In the earlier book, the narrative line was highly dramatic, involving murder, violence, fear and tragedy.  Again, however, the real purpose of the writer was to deploy this as a vehicle for philosophising.  The test of such philosophising is simple:  it is truth to life.

            In both books, this is the quality, stylishly presented; at times in the manner of Virginia Woolf, that justifies the intense feeling which emerges from her mundane world.