Jude calls her “Sharkbait” when he first sees her, swimming in the ocean. It’s the only name we ever know her by, the narrator of Madelaine Lucas’s debut novel Thirst for Salt. She meets Jude in the year of her 24th birthday, holidaying down the coast with her mother. Jude is almost 20 years her senior and lives alone, a charming bachelor with an penchant for antique furniture. The pull of their attraction is instant and raw, and the two fall into a love affair that continues for almost a year. Their time together is powerful and deeply formative and one the narrator reflects on, years later, when she stumbles across a photo of her once lover with his child, the marker of the family he created without her.
Lucas, an Australian author living and teaching in New York, writes as if she’s telling the story at a dinner party, with a lingering pace and an easy familiarity with the characters. As she recalls the intimate details of this fictional lost love, Lucas draws thematic lines between the romantic relationships women have with men and the (perhaps more complex) relationships they have with their mothers and other women in their lives. Lucas has amplified this tension by positioning the narrator’s lover and her mother at similar ages, allowing them to compete for her attention from similar points of experience.
In a way, all three are living vicariously through each other, trying on lives and loves for size or attempting to recreate the past. As the narrator describes it at one point, it is “a way of brushing hands with a life that might have been mine”. This kind of sliding-doors storytelling, of might-have-beens and misunderstandings, is appealing in its universality – who hasn’t imagined what life would look like if we’d done just one thing differently?
But there’s a danger too, that the novel reflects, in getting too lost in the past and it’s a struggle that, interestingly, the narrator feels most keenly when she’s in her 20s. An aspiring writer, she is deeply introspective and often looks to the past to try to explain the present. Both Jude and her mother accuse her frequently of being too stuck in the past; early in the novel, her mother tells her that she “tends to [her] loneliness like a garden”, while Jude’s criticisms are often delivered with a patronising air that implies he is a man much older and more worldly than he really is.
Jude is described as only being interested in the present and his attempts to shut down conversations with the narrator by equating her age with a lack of experience are undermined by his own failures to address his past trauma. He’s the kind of infuriating manchild that, if this were a story being relayed at a dinner party, would elicit the eye rolls he does from the narrator’s two housemates, who have a far less starry-eyed view of the relationship than she does.
But the most interesting relationship explored in the novel is motherhood. The narrator’s mother is very present in her life and Lucas perfectly captures the petty tensions that muddle in among genuine care and concern. Both mother and daughter desire independence at the same time as wanting to be needed and this duality is tangled in their relationship as they explore their identities within and beyond their roles as mother, lover or daughter. “I think now that this is something that happens in small families – roles get confused, relationships do double duty,” the narrator reflects. “So a daughter might play the part of an overprotective parent, or a mother might rely on the daughter like a partner. Mother as runaway child, daughter as mother, daughter as husband.”
Is this universally true of all small families, or is it particularly charged in families where a single mother sees herself in her daughter? In this family the roles are doubly blurred, because the narrator’s brother is much younger than her, so she and her mother are almost interchangeable as the maternal figure in his life. The fact that both mother and daughter are unnamed allows them to step in and out of these roles as parent, child, lover and friend, although neither ever really manages to create something entirely new for herself.
There’s a melancholy that underpins a lot of Thirst for Salt, a sense of loss, but also of missed opportunities and lives not lived. Lucas leaves her readers, quietly, in this moment of reflection, where the possibilities of past and future stretch endlessly across the horizon.
Thirst for Salt by Madelaine Lucas is published in Australia by Allen & Unwin ($32.99) and in the US by Tin House. It will be published in the UK by Oneworld in May.
