'The Homemade God' review: Family drama in an Italian setting

Rachel Joyce understands a common angst of middle age: the feeling of being stuck. The characters in her six novels blossom only after leaving the familiar behind. And, as in the works of Anne Tyler, each of Joyce’s novels is so entertaining that it is easy to forget the darkness that underpins the story.

In “The Homemade God,” Joyce tries something different. She has not one but four protagonists, and the point of view moves from one to another, chapter by chapter. This complex structure is somehow more satisfying and more frustrating to read than if she’d told the story in a more straightforward way. Readers get to know these four siblings so well that they may want to shake them and shout, Buck up! Stop drinking! Grow a spine!

The siblings, in their 30s and 40s, are the offspring of a bombastic, hard-drinking and very successful artist named Vic Kemp. His schlocky paintings of beautiful women ended up on millions of posters and refrigerator magnets but never, to his dismay, in a respected museum. He learned to paint by copying others and never really strayed from that. “Vic would have done anything to be thought of as a great artist, and if that meant plagiarism, he would do it.”

Readers may see through Vic’s shallowness, but his children don’t. They believe in the myth of his greatness. “Even as a child,” Joyce writes of his daughter Susan, “she’d felt they were separate from other people, as if being Vic Kemp’s children gave them an extra glow of specialness.”

A widower early on, Vic allowed the children to raise themselves, co-opting their au pairs to use as models and lovers. And so Netta, the oldest child, took on the role of mother. Susan did her best to serve as surrogate housewife. Iris, the youngest, was the only one who posed for Vic’s paintings. He chose her, he said, because she could be quiet and still, and so she made a lifetime of being quiet and still.

And the only son, Goose, short for Gustav, is a heartbreaking, gentle soul who suffered a breakdown and thereafter devoted himself to preparing his father’s canvases and cleaning his studio.

Now adults, the four are stuck, trapped in the roles they adopted as children, their lives revolving almost entirely around their father.

And then Vic, 76, announces he is going to remarry. The woman’s name is Bella-Mae, and she is younger than Vic’s youngest daughter. The news enrages his children.

“Seriously?” Netta says. “If he’s so lonely he could get a cat.”

“How can you say he’s lonely?” Susan says. “He has us.”

The couple heads to Vic’s summer home on an Italian island, and shortly thereafter Vic suddenly dies. Off the siblings go to Italy on their life-changing journey.

The book poses so many questions it almost reads like a murder mystery, though there is no murder. Or is there? Joyce keeps the reader guessing. How did Vic, a strong swimmer, drown? What was that weird, stinky tea that Bella-Mae kept pushing on him? And the biggest question of all: Where is Vic’s last painting, the one he was working on when he died, the one he claimed would be his masterpiece?

Joyce has great fun in this novel, letting Vic’s kids go to pieces in outrageous ways. Her descriptions of the Italian countryside are alluring: “A round summer moon balanced on the tips of the trees, like a soft peach.” Or, “The sky had turned the palest blue, like a piece of gauze, and the last of the daylight lay in quills on the grass.” Her metaphors are delightful and surprising: “She had a Kleenex in each hand, rolled up like pink mice.”

But what makes this book so memorable is Joyce’s deep understanding of familial relationships and the stunted growth caused by a fraught upbringing. The siblings spend their entire lives trying to extricate themselves from their childhood roles.

“We’re all trying to find out who we are, beyond our parents,” Goose thinks.

With a father like Vic Kemp, good luck.