It’s a modern mystery why Charlotte Mendelson, one of the funniest writers in Britain, isn’t a bestseller (though she has just been longlisted for the Women’s prize for fiction). Her new novel is so devoid of secondhand sentences that it’s quite possible she spent all nine years since its predecessor polishing her jokes and turning phrases round until they shine.
The Exhibitionist is about artists: a popular subject for novelists, who get to write about the creative process in a slightly more glamorous field than their own. It has two focal points: one is Ray Hanrahan, an ageing painter who is a reminder that not every overlooked artist deserves a renaissance. Ray – obstreperous, self-involved (“Soon he’ll be in the bath with his accessories: the paper and a large bacon sandwich”) – is the physical centre of his ramshackle London house, where “what Ray insists are just very big mice have tunnelled into the compost bin”.
Orbiting him on the weekend the novel is set – in February 2010 – are two daughters, a stepson and his wife, Lucia, the story’s emotional centre. Lucia is an artist too, aged 54 (“almost dead”), and has spent decades squashing down a talent and ambition of her own that Ray never noticed. Instead, “making him great was their joint project”, and only now that she’s older, “children launched”, is she beginning to notice the sparkling opportunities that keep trying to catch her eye.
Thinking of herself doesn’t come easy to Lucia: life with Ray would be a full-time job even if she wasn’t feeling drained from cancer surgery. A master emotional manipulator (“What woman can resist a crying man? They’re so bad at it; it takes so much”), he even had an affair when she was recovering. “It’s horrible for you and me both. She used us,” he tells Lucia.
Ray’s dark energy crackles mostly just out of vision: we get multiple angles of his character (someone asks Lucia if her cancer made her depressed: “Ray says I was horrible. So maybe”), but we never see inside his head, which I suppose would spoil the fun. He goes straight into the annals of bad dads, bad husbands and great comic creations. But as he prepares for his first showing of new work in decades – which comes off just as the reader hopes – Lucia is finding that all her pent-up energy has to go somewhere. She is about to achieve escape velocity, not just artistically but sexually, and it turns out that Mendelson is just as good at writing sexy as she is at writing funny.
Throughout the book her gift is in succinct specificity of detail, which is perfectly deployed whether for comic atmosphere (“breathing cottage-pie steam from the Pensioners’ Club”), characterisation (“Hellie Brook was unsmiling, flat, tall”) or emotional ambivalence toward parenthood (“someone had to take care of them and she wanted to, sort of”). The result is a precision of observation that made me laugh frequently and smile when I wasn’t laughing.
As the title suggests, The Exhibitionist is about what is and isn’t on display. Ray keeps nothing hidden – his former lover Sukie Blackstock even turns up at his show, “the first horsewoman of the Apocalypse” – while Lucia keeps everything to herself, until she can no longer. The book, too, keeps secrets, with many chapters ending on an unresolved cliffhanger or a rhetorical question. That might be one weak spot: the exquisite prose can cushion the emotions, and blot out the plot at least until the final stretch. But we don’t complain about this with other prose stylists, such as Saul Bellow or Martin Amis. “Is this,” wonders Lucia at the end of one chapter, “what it’s like to be a man?”
The Exhibitionist by Charlotte Mendelson is published by Mantle (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
