Review by Booklist Review
Barnes' debut is a book written for adults with older parents. Miranda is an actress in her late forties who journeys from England regularly back to her parents' aging home in France, where seemingly nothing has changed. Her parents have been married for 50 years and are stubbornly set in their ways. Miranda is their go-between in conversations and arguments and rolls her eyes as she reports back to her older sister, Charlotte. The Usual Desire to Kill has an uncanny way of demonstrating to the readers exactly what it is like to go through the motions with older parents, as Miranda navigates her mother's hip replacement without telling her father and desires to have a conversation with her parents as equals. Barnes' empathetic prose is simple and gentle, and each point of view brings a new, sometimes painful perspective to the table, but only the reader knows the full story. With this intimate novel, Barnes explores long marriage, sibling rivalry, truths behind shifting memories, and family secrets as well as examining the decisions people make in life, the long-term effects of those decisions, and how well one truly knows the people they love.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Playwright Barnes combines humor with pathos in her heart-wrenching debut, the story of an aging British couple's unhappy marriage told mainly from the perspective of their actor daughter. Miranda's parents were born during WWII and have been together since their student days at Oxford. Dad, a retired philosophy professor, now tends to llamas, chickens, and cats at their rundown manor house in central France, where he and Mum, who got pregnant before she could finish her studies, moved after raising Miranda and her older sister, Charlotte, in England. The parents' endless stream of bickering, "a game of stubbornness versus pedantry," is witnessed most often by Miranda, now pushing 50, who visits regularly from Paris. She relates their bitter and witty exchanges in emails to Charlotte and in scripts, which comprise the text of the novel along with Miranda's narration and Mum's old letters. Miranda and Charlotte think they know their parents all too well, but the genius of the novel lies in the ways Barnes highlights how parents can never be fully known to their children, no matter how observant their children are. In Mum's letters to her sister, for example, she reveals an affair with an American traveler during her Oxford days, the outcome of which helps to explain her acerbic nature, while Dad shares a secret of his own with Miranda's daughter, Alice, in the form of a poignant philosophical conundrum. It's an unforgettable story about the limits of judging others. Agent: Nicole Aragi, Aragi Inc. (Apr.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Two women do the best they can with their aging parents, a couple of British academics retired to France. Though the title sounds like a murder mystery, in this case it refers to a feeling Miranda reports to her sister, Charlotte, by email, during a visit to their parents' home: "You know what it's like: the usual desire to kill." That's the sisters' consistent reaction to spending time with their crotchety, ailing, brilliant parents (and their llamas, Lollo and Leonora). The portraits of Dad and Mum, delivered in the first person by actress/playwright Miranda, are the highlights of playwright Barnes' fiction debut, along with the ongoing banter volleyed among all the characters. The book also includes emails between the sisters, letters written in the 1960s to someone named Kitty by "Your Loving Sister," and a small number of sections written in the third person covering developments Miranda is not privy to. The book delights in arcane family rituals, code names, and practices: "doing the ducks"; characters referred to as DK (Dog Killer) and HQ (Headquarters); an apparently fictional sibling named James; the horrors of a finally retired chest freezer named Boswell, which was moved to France from England along with all its contents; a host of shared literary references, from Epictetus to Kipling, Shakespeare to Stevie Smith. Mum's impending hip replacement surgery, to be performed in Paris, is the closest thing the book has to a plot--it occasions a gathering of all five family members, including Miranda's 19-year-old daughter, Alice, at the parents' home, where a few remaining mysteries are cleared up. Higher stakes would not have been a bad idea; as it is, the reader waits for something to knock these characters out of their patterns of humoring and needling and misunderstanding each other and it just doesn't come, making for a melancholy denouement. As long as you don't get the idea that anyone's going to change, you'll be charmed. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
