Envy and Compassion

Jan 2016

I admire writers who claim they never read their reviews. Sometimes I even believe them. I’m not one of those writers and confess to having read all 33 Amazon reviews since my debut novel, Learning To Speak American, was published a few months ago. I haven’t had any bad reviews yet, but some have hinted at their dislike of my protagonists, Duncan and Lola Drummond.

Lola is beautiful and affluent with an enviable lifestyle, so I suppose she is an easy target for resentment, but she also lost her only child in an accident while on her husband’s watch. He is tortured by anxiety that he cannot admit to, and the marriage is dying a slow and painful death.

On a superficial level Lola has everything, but she has also lost everything that really matters. And as her creator, it’s interesting to see readers’ reaction to that contradiction. Some express nothing but compassion for Lola. Others find it difficult to forgive her innate privilege.

Lola’s husband, Duncan, doesn’t escape the ‘envy versus compassion’ treatment either. Like Lola, I endowed him with an embarrassment of riches—public school education, good looks, successful career—but the guilt he feels over his daughter’s death, consumes him with remorse and regret and infrequent but debilitating panic attacks. Without giving too much away, some reviewers disliked Duncan for the dubious coping strategy he developed in the wake of the tragedy, and even though I heap misfortune upon him, they find it hard to see beyond his buttoned-up British reserve and bad behaviour.

As I worked through the many drafts of Learning To Speak American, I felt it important to create complex characters, fraught with flaws and inconsistencies, because these are indicative of the human condition. Yes, Lola is beautiful, but she is also lonely, the product of a broken home: absent father, alcoholic mother. Yes, she flies first class and stays in five star hotels, but she would trade those things in a heartbeat to hold her child one more time.

Duncan too, unravels before the readers eyes, his upper-middle class status more of a burden than a blessing, in that it inhibits him from getting the help he so desperately needs. The story is set in 2009, at the start of the economic recession, and like millions of other people, the possibility of financial ruin looms large and real for Duncan. I suspect men might more readily empathize with Duncan’s plight, but as the majority of my readers are women, I may never know.

My second novel, An Unsuitable Marriage, will be published early next year. Again, I have created protagonists who only discover their true character when stripped of all certainties and comforts. It will be interesting to read the reviews, if only to see whether they are greeted with envy or compassion.