Love Orange by Natasha Randall
Review by Jess Moody
‘… little secrets were the pins of resistance. With secrets, you could escape the reflection you were trapped within - the picture of the person your spouse thinks you to be.’
Jenny Tinkley is questioning her role as suburban wife and mother, even as her usefulness is usurped by the ‘smart home’ her husband insists on. Teenage son Jesse is immersed in online gaming, while nine-year-old Luke attempts to categorise the chaos around him. Hank, the modern paterfamilias, struggles to maintain routines of resilience against a world beyond his control.
If the story of dysfunctional Americana feels a little well-trodden, never fear. Author Natasha Randall enjoys a subtle tipping of conventionality. Before you realise what’s infusing the text, she has planted three essential ingredients for this family’s unravelling: Jenny’s ‘prison pen pal’ sends her envelopes sealed with an intoxicating orange glue; the family’s church begins taking Confession via text (‘the God-phone’); and Luke’s empathetic collecting prompts a panic of masculinity in his father (‘what would a Viking do?’). The result is a gleeful disaster of slow-burning gendered rage, a searching for relevance, and an addiction to the extraordinary.
The Tinkleys are of course, not an ‘everyman’ family. Randall notes and gently mocks their Whiteness, their suburban upper-middle class privileges. Interactions with those outside of their social spheres are awkward, overly-self-conscious. Yet the family's very confinement provides a crucible for their existential crises: a realisation that their bespoke house offers no template for happiness; the heavy reckoning of marriage and parenthood on women; the erosion of privacy and the impossibility of connection in a world lived online.
Randall approaches these heavy themes with an exquisite balance of humour and pathos (expected perhaps, from a writer who has previously been entrusted with translating Gogol). More than a meandering satire, this a story full of energetic leaps, from the tragicomic (Hank’s survivalist male-bonding on a camping trip) to the near farcical (Jenny’s jumping around the house to outwit the computer that tracks her every move). There are excruciating hide-behind-your-hands moments set within their daily sagas. Jenny, bathing with headphones while the house alarm wails. Hank’s attempts to sell services to a Priest who thinks he’s confessing to heinous sins. The burden of a dead dog dripping into the sofa.
Miscommunication provides the joy and sorrow of this novel. The Tinkleys suffocate each other into secrecy. The consequences of each other’s actions are left unspoken, or unseen, until the reader is provided with an alternative vantage point – intercepted confessions, video recordings, tales tattled and symptoms spread. This is a family in cascade failure. But a beautiful failure, nonetheless, for Randall slips in moments of delicate poetry. We catch glimpses of Jenny as the world has made her, in ‘wife-smiled’, ‘love-worried’. We take pause in the author’s mastery of the language of the mundane: ‘…soup. Marriage soup. A soup of stones’.
Such touches of humanity matter. It’s a truism of fiction which engages with technology, that the tech is but a mirror to human failings. Randall’s offering here though is a fresher, empathetic tone. The tech is there, everywhere, but it is presented as it should be: harmfully quotidian, often nameless, its origins – as young Luke notes – mostly unknown and unquestioned. Instead Randall quietly enquiries about the gaps which tech and chemistry are trying to fill. What synthesis are we all seeking in the synthetic?
The setting and plot of Love Orange is extremely well crafted, full of connections designed to distance. A town made up of ‘drive-thrus’. A household with a computer at its centre. Old-fashioned letters making their way through prison walls to strangers’ hands, into strangers’ bodies. This is asynchronous anxiety. The novel explores – sometimes quite literally – not only the glue that holds it all together, but such things have come to be: a marriage, a family, an addiction, a hole in life’s foundations. Little Luke will question adults’ lack of curiosity. Jenny will wonder which sacrifices are too many, and try to escape the answer. Hank may eventually understand what his own questions are.
Revelations are carefully chosen and paced, and Randall neatly side-steps a clean denouement, the tease of a life hack. Predictions and pathways have no place in a novel of such present times, and some conversations pause in three marching dots. There is no fast forward, no rewind, in something as ever-moving as a family. Only the question of the colour of the love that remains.
Love Orange is published by riverrun, 3rd September 2020