Fiction

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Behind the Scenes
at the Museum

By Kate Atkinson. St. Martin's Press. 336 pages.

In her offbeat, playful, and often poignant first novel, the young British writer Kate Atkinson offers us the voice of a jubilant, irreverent narrator, Ruby Lennox, who at once celebrates and mercilessly skewers her middle-class English family. From the moment of her conception in York in 1951 (the novel is smartly launched with the exclamation, "I exist!"), Ruby casts a frank and omniscient eye on her disjointed clan, viewing with growing alarm her distant, philandering father George, her profoundly irritable mother Bunty, and her two emotionally overwhelmed sisters. Life for the Lennox clan revolves around the family petshop, the occasional tragedy (such as when the petshop burns down), and visits with a bevy of eccentric relatives. Atkinson, who has won the UK's prestigious Ian St. James Award for her short stories, seamlessly alternates this normal, workaday world with darker family secrets -- including an odd "feeling of something long forgotten" that will haunt Ruby throughout her life.

Through a series of lengthy "footnotes" that follow each chapter, Atkinson also recounts tales drawn from over a century of the family's history -- tracing the passage of oddities and flawed traits from one generation to the next. A few of these work as colorful snapshots, as when Ruby's great-grandmother runs away with a French magician, or when we learn that the Second World War, for Bunty, was not so much a matter of getting a husband as acquiring a personality. But the majority of the tales (such as the one in which her grandmother buys new boots after the Boer War), do little to illuminate the more compelling modern-day narrative. Worse still, they lack Ruby's clever voice. In the end, Atkinson is so successful in creating her wry, witty central character that any other perspective seems like a digression we don't want to follow.

--Megan Harlan

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