Book review: A writer in search of good material

A Life Like Other People’s

A Memoir

Alan Bennett

Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 256 pp., $22

In 1966, Alan Bennett was just beginning the career that would endear him to his native England as one of the country’s most prolific and acclaimed playwrights. But, surveying his own life at the time, he was conscious of something lacking: He could not claim any of the things some writers suffer through and later mine for material — a miserable childhood, maybe, or a backdrop of political upheaval. Or, at the very least, eccentric parents. In his memoir, “A Life Like Other People’s,” Bennett writes that, at that early point, “I … had already given up on my own background because the material seemed so thin.”. Even World War II — which, as a world-historical event of considerable sweep and import, would seem to qualify — passed over the family: His father’s work as a butcher exempted him from military service. So much for that. Bennett, like other writers of reasonably good fortune, would have to look elsewhere.

“A Life Like Other People’s” is the story of Bennett’s realization that his family is more interesting than he initially thought, prompted by his father’s revelation of a long-held family secret. Bennett is more perplexed than troubled about being lied to, and anyway he, like his father, is preoccupied with his mother, who has suddenly descended into depression and fits of delusional, oddball behavior: fleeing the house in her nightgown, for example, and claiming that household objects are spying on her. As the book begins, she is admitted to a mental hospital. Perhaps, the young writer thinks, there is some material to be gleaned from his family life after all. “This,” he writes of the family secret, “perked things up a bit.”

First published as “Untold Stories” in Bennett’s 2005 collection of the same name, this story appears now on its own, re-titled and unbound to that previous collection’s smatterings of essays, reviews and lectures. It is a retelling, then, but justified by Bennett’s refreshing honesty and ability to wryly and insistently avoid the more tiresome tendencies of the family memoir. There isn’t much redemption to be found here. Bennett, the searching child, does not elevate his parents to heroic status, nor does he take readers down the medical memoir path, brandishing research and studies to call attention to a cause. Indeed, he notes, Freud would have considered his mother’s condition too banal to make her one of his case studies.

The real testament to Bennett’s talent is his ability to incorporate that kind of seemingly unfeeling observation into portraits of his parents that are tender and ultimately very moving. Still, there is an underlying shrewdness to the project, never distasteful, but very much camouflaged by the staid Britishness of tone that is one of Bennett’s trademarks. (It is a tone, it must be said, likely to strike the American ear as a bit prudish and almost comically restrained, though Bennett clearly enjoys puncturing this image now and then with crude slang or something unexpectedly graphic.) Bennett is conflicted about his relations with his parents, especially when annoyance crowds out sympathy when it comes to his mother’s condition.

There is also a bit of intra-family class conflict, and the Oxford man Bennett’s status as “the educated one” in the family is one of his prime sources of guilt. When his mother begins to behave strangely, Bennett writes, of his parents, “I used to wish that they both had the education they always longed for, feeling, snobbishly perhaps, that mental affliction was more appropriate to, sat more suitably on, someone educated or higher up the social scale.”

Long after his father’s death, Bennett places his mother in a hospice-like home for people with Alzheimer’s — though he personally refuses to diagnose her with that disease, since “neither Mam nor Dad was ever a big joiner.” Visiting her, he learns that the nurses have been calling her by the wrong name, but she does not care or even notice. Hoping, vainly, to see a glint of recognition in her eyes, he leaves, doubting if she has even registered his presence. Walking away, he thinks: “Speechless and seemingly beyond reach, she dozes in the first-floor bedroom in the house above the bay, regularly fed and watered, her hair done every fortnight, oblivious of place and time and touch. In the other beds women come and go, or come and die, my mother outlasting them all.”

That passage goes some way toward capturing the profound sense of loneliness that permeates this exceedingly humane little book.

Beyer’s work has appeared in various publications, including the New York Times, Columbia Journalism Review and McSweeney’s.