The Rain Before It Falls

There is much to applaud about Coe’s new novel: lovely prose, intriguing structure, deft handling of a large cast of characters in a fairly compressed narrative, and a driving intelligence about human behavior. We’d like to sit by a fire with the author and gossip with him, pick his brain about politics, and take his recommendations for further reading—not because the novel is gossipy, or political, or referential, but because it’s generous and smart. We’d like to be friends with it.

The Rain centers on a dynasty of female nemeses, locked in a generational cycle of cruelty and abuse. Characters grow from miserable victim to miserable victimizer, and a mixture of hope and fear attends the birth of each new daughter. When the cycle finally halts in the fourth generation, it’s a genuine relief as well as a tragedy. And monsters though they are, these women suffer authentically, try to break away from each other, and repent when they can bear to do so.

Their story transmits via tape recordings created by Rosamond, a cousin now in her seventies, who has loved these women and watched them closely all her life, attempting to intervene and often being wounded herself. The recordings are willed to Imogen, the last of the daughters, who was taken from her mother, and who Rosamond believes will someday want to know her history. Through the telling, Rosamond builds a coherent narrative of her own life, burying her own great joys and disappointments in the digressions, in a way that is both believable and canny on Coe’s part.

All of this is framed—probably unnecessarily—by the story of Rosamond’s niece Gill, who listens to the tapes with her own daughters, after failing to locate their intended recipient. Though this complexity lends a certain richness, it’s too fussy, too obviously concerned with familiar questions about storytelling. If we ever got to sit around the fire with Coe, we bet he’d tell stories with less apparatus, less self-conscious attention to form. And we bet they’d be good.