Laura has a one night stand with a stranger she never sees again and gets preggo. Deciding to keep the baby, she raises her daughter Emma as a single mother, though luckily she belongs to an upper class Manhattan family which makes things easier. Laura & Emma is the story of the mother and daughter over the course of 15 years.
I really enjoyed Kate Greathead’s most recent novel The Book of George which made me seek out her debut, and to date only other, novel Laura & Emma. Both novels are about the story of two people’s relationships with one another and, thankfully, it’s a decent read (too many authors are one-hit wonders) though not as much fun as The Book of George was.
Part of that is the lack of a driving narrative. The chapters are named after a year, starting in 1980 and ending in 1995, and we follow Laura and Emma as they get older. It’s a very passive kind of storytelling without a hook to make you want to keep going for long. It’s not a book I was drawn to pick up often but, when I did, I did find my time reading it pleasant enough - a credit to Greathead’s prose.
I’m not sure why specifically she chose these years to set the story in. There is just the one era-specific character - the gay paediatrician who becomes a social pariah during the AIDS crisis in the ‘80s - though he is a very minor character. Otherwise, this could’ve easily been set in more recent times but maybe Greathead wanted to avoid the internet bullshit that’s made modern life so much fun, particularly for parents, post-1995?
Laura wistfully notes the growing distance between herself and her younger brother Nicholas; they chill out at their family’s summer home; Laura struggles to become friends with her sister-in-law; Laura starts dating again as she settles into her role of single mom; Emma gets into cliques at school; the two battle one another once Emma starts puberty. It’s fairly mundane stuff for the most part.
But then you add the chapter years element and you see perhaps what Greathead’s driving at overall: how years can be defined in memory by a handful of scenes, how quickly they pass cumulatively, and, before you know it, the baby you cradled has become a real person standing in front of you yelling about your shortcomings as a parent. Is it accurate? No idea, I’m not a parent myself, but the effect worked well in the book.
The other possible meaning of the novel is a sly critique of the Manhattan upper classes, but I didn’t really get that from the story. Occasionally you see how privileged Laura and Nicholas are, and both are slightly pathetic for their ongoing dependence on their wealthy father, but Greathead is mostly intent on making the reader like Laura and so she doesn’t really press this aspect of the story as much as she could if that was her aim.
A weird detail I noticed: like in The Book of George, a male character at the end of the book gets a job repairing voting machines, just like George did. That’s an odd authorial trademark to have!
Laura & Emma isn’t the most compelling or memorable story - there are no grand arcs or big finales; it maintains the same steady pace throughout. But it also does feel like a snapshot of real lives in Manhattan, which is something. The characters are good company and cleverly composed and the prose is accessible. There are more compelling, dramatic scenes in The Book of George, and I would recommend that book over this as the starting place for Kate Greathead, as, while the story of Laura & Emma is an agreeable one, it’s a little too cosy for my taste. Certainly though not a bad read for all that.
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