Claire Lynch’s debut novel, “A Family Matter,” is built around a dark fact, stated plainly in an author’s note at the end — in the 1980s in the U.K., 90% of lesbian mothers in divorce cases lost custody of their children.
Such a terrible injustice is hard to imagine, which is surely why Lynch has imagined it — to understand how decent people could let something like this happen.
“A Family Matter” is structured with two storylines, one in 2022 and one in 1982, and both open with people leaving things out of the narrative. In the current window, an elderly man named Heron has just received a diagnosis of terminal cancer. In his nightly phone call with his daughter Maggie, he doesn’t mention a thing about his visit to the doctor.
In the past situation, a 23-year-old woman named Dawn makes a new friend at a jumble sale. To prolong their time together, Hazel walks her home: “She knew she should have mentioned them, the husband and child waiting inside, her real life. It wasn’t a lie, Dawn told herself, just a break, a few hours of being a different kind of young again.”
We’ll soon realize that these omissions foreshadow a much larger one. In the ’80s timeline, Dawn’s daughter is a little girl named Maggie, so Dawn must be the woman from whom Heron has been divorced for almost 40 years. We’ll eventually learn that Dawn and Hazel fell in love, and when she told Heron, he reacted very badly, and was railroaded by his lawyer into an arrangement where Dawn lost all access to her daughter.
The ’80s storyline ends with the court case, with Dawn’s expulsion from her daughter’s life on the eve of Maggie’s 4th birthday. We get a few last glimpses of her lurking at the playground, screaming through the letterbox, and Heron wonders if the injunction preventing contact is “a bit strong,” “a bit much.” But he enforces it for the next 40 years.
Maggie is helping her dying father put his affairs in order when she comes across a document that explains why her mother completely disappeared.
By taking care to make Heron a likable character, and by reducing to a distant memory, uncovered in the present, the years of hiding birthday cards, avoiding questions and lying through his teeth, the novel pulls its punches. I didn’t believe that the characters would behave as they did, and so I didn’t feel their pain or their catharsis as deeply as I should have.
