The Paper Palace, by Miranda Cowley Heller Alex Clark

eclecticism with which he pursued far-flung research. Both are exemplary of the historian’s open, investigative, non-doctrinaire mission.

Yet empathy can easily be mistaken for sympathy and arouse consternation. In ‘Brexiteers, Revisionists and Sleepwalkers’, he records the hostile reception The Sleepwalkers received at the hands of left-wing German historians who saw the bestseller as loosening the chains of German war guilt. They dubbed this perceived influence the ‘Clark effect’. They mocked his notion of ‘sleepwalking’ as a revamped version of Lloyd George’s disingenuous claim that Europe had ‘slithered’ into the war accidentally.

On the defensive, Clark asserts that the war was ‘the consequence of hugely complex chains of decisions made in full consciousness of the risks involved’. However, a few pages later, he aligns himself with those who observed that ‘phases of détente’ could mute ‘the key actors’ awareness of the dangers attendant upon their decisions’.

He can’t have it both ways. Surely his sleepwalking metaphor does imply a degree of obliviousness. Rightly: no one has ever made completely informed decisions except in theoretical models. They were fully awake – not fully aware.

OLDIE NOVEL OF THE MONTH American Gothic

ALEX CLARK The Paper Palace By Miranda Cowley Heller Viking £14.99

The Cape Cod summer home that gives Miranda Cowley Heller’s debut novel its title is, quite deliberately, a world away from the temporary thrills of a stylish Airbnb or the grandeur of a longestablished luxury hotel.

It signifies the class of permanent ownership and the unshowiness of a certain type of wealth; the confidence to be shabby and uncomfortable. The family of the narrator, Elle, delight in the new generations of mice they discover in the drawers of splintered furniture, the bug attacks and the cold water into which they daily plunge. They return to the clapboard camp her grandfather built year after year, with no need of vulgar novelty or convenience.

In a narrative filled with dreadful transgressions that are either absorbed into the flow of bad behaviour or kept precariously secret, perhaps the most egregious sin is that of a neighbour who rips out her antique floral

‘Helping me to pack my bags was the nicest thing you’ve done in years, Norman’ wallpaper and replaces it with tastefully neutral paint.

There is, of course, far worse going on. Cowley Heller is adept at controlling the pace of revelation through this densely plotted novel, served by her twin time frame.

In the 24 hours of the story’s present, Elle must decide how to proceed after a passionate sexual encounter with her oldest friend, while her husband and three children and her mother plan outings and bicker. Interspersed with this strand, there are dispatches from her fragmented childhood, themselves studded with recollections of the generations before.

We open with the morning after the night before. The emptied bottles, encrusted candle wax and sore heads suggest conviviality that has perhaps gone on a drink too many. A picnic at the scorching beach beckons, including Jonas, Elle’s friend-turned-lover, and his wife, whom – there must be one in every holiday party – nobody likes quite enough.

But amid all these social set pieces come the one-on-one moments that run through family gatherings: shifting alliances, irritable flash points and hastily cobbled-together bits of saving face and smoothing over that allow the show to rumble on in relative harmony.

Considering whether or not to leave your husband is a bigger fly in the ointment than a quarrel over hanging up wet towels and making sure there’s ice for the cocktails. That’s particularly the case if, as in Elle and Jonas’s position, there exists a shared past made as much of concealed trauma as of love and desire.

The gradual teasing out of the events of a momentous teenage summer is in itself juicy enough bait for the reader to keep turning the pages. But what really gives the novel its heft is a skilful portrait of the damage Elle’s parents have inflicted on their two daughters, one of whom is conspicuous by her absence. ‘In my mother’s family,’ explains Elle, ‘divorce is just a seven-letter word. Letters that could easily be replaced by I’m bored or Bad luck.’ Her mother Wallace’s parents were each married three times, and Wallace and Elle’s father use their break-up as a springboard into a series of similarly fraught relationships. It is Wallace’s marriage to Leo, who brought with him two children, that most cataclysmically marked Elle’s childhood and makes her profoundly conscious of her responsibilities to her own offspring. Wallace, the model of motherhood and marriage she is reacting to and against, provides the novel’s most charismatic and energetic presence. Her advice to Elle, when she meets her husband Peter – himself possessed of a pair of gothically posh British parents – is to ‘keep your mouth closed and look mysterious. Think Botticelli.’ She is grimly awful and awfully attractive at the same time – which, one registers, explains quite a lot about her romantic life. Cowley Heller has spent much of her working life in television, including developing dramas for HBO. Consequently, she brings to fiction an understanding of how to layer storylines, as well as an assured feel for dialogue and visual description. It’s not hard to see The Paper Palace making the transition to a gorgeously filmed mini-series. She undercuts the sense of reading about the travails of a bunch of rich people who are not terribly interested in the travails of anyone else with an impressive commitment to the characters’ backstories. And she suggests that making peace with the past is so very much harder than shutting up and thinking of Botticelli.