In her seventh novel Esther Freud casts off the complex family ties that dominate her early books, and the middle European angst of more recent works, to embrace the funny yet brutal world of acting.
Nell, Dan and Charlie are first-year drama students, arriving full of nerves at an exclusive London college to begin their induction into the mysteries of Stanislavsky. Their teachers are a formidable gay couple with assistants including a "tiny, ancient" accompanist straight out of central casting. The students are a medley of types, but attention focuses on the trio at the centre of Freud's ensemble.
Initially, as in any freshers' week, we have a series of aching crushes: Dan fancies Jemma, who fancies him back, while Nell watches them whispering with "a small knot of longing tightening her gut". Charlie is breaking up with Rob, for a few days at least, freeing her up to try to help Nell out with Dan though when it comes to the point, Nell finds herself troubled by erotic thoughts about Charlie instead.
Kind, unconfident, "plump as a pony", Nell is the narrator's favourite. Dan and Charlie are more successful, more beautiful, more wrapped up in themselves. Though narrated in the past tense, this is a novel that unfolds in the present, and unusually for Freud, very little space is devoted to filling in details of backgrounds, families, childhoods. Her students are too busy projecting themselves forwards to spend time dwelling on the past.
The novel spans a 14-year stretch, from 1992 to 2006, so we follow Nell as she is chucked out of Drama Arts before the final year, fills in time working at Pizza Express and finally finds an obscure agent off the back of a show above a Chiswick pub. Tantalisingly, Freud refers only in passing to her "rather good" performance as a penguin in between, but there are lots of jokes like this. Acting, we gather, is not to be taken too seriously.
But nor is it to be mocked. Freud trained as an actor herself (like Nell, she was asked to leave drama school, but persisted with acting for years before writing her first novel), and is married to actor David Morrissey, so she knows what she is talking about. In a recent interview she said she had rewritten the novel after Morrissey judged a first draft too "cynical". Reading the final version this seems hard to believe. Lucky Break is steadfast in its good humour, and very kind. Satire is spurned and the novel instead becomes the gentlest kind of cautionary tale, with the author making a wild though not unwelcome grab for the rose-tinted spectacles towards the end.
"How could you not say 'darling' when you'd journeyed through a lifetime with a person, bared your soul, wept tears, exchanged kisses, borne heartache, reached the heights of unimagined bliss? Why would you shake hands sombrely when you'd once died in their arms?" muses Charlie at an after-show party. Freud is the defender of her actors' innocence, seeing off the man in the pub who looms over their self-regarding chatter to say "You're full of shit", and later exonerating Nell and her friend Sita when they realise an attempt to research domestic violence by visiting a women's refuge was crass.
She is clear-eyed about pervasive sexual inequality, even offering statistics on the number of jobs for men and women, and in writing about her female characters some bitterness at last creeps in. For them, looks can seem almost everything, and Nell's first meeting with a film director ends when she is almost raped.
Freud has talked openly of how her novels are built up around memories of her own life, and Lucky Break is transparently drawn from experience. Some scenes feel painfully real, as when Nell ditches her loyal and enthusiastic agent in favour of a more glamorous outfit. Freud is lucky, as a writer of this sort, in being richly endowed with natural resources: her unconventional childhood traipsing around Morocco was the source material for her debut Hideous Kinky, while extraordinary family history supplied themes for later books (she is the daughter of painter Lucian Freud and great grand-daughter of Sigmund Freud).
Her previous novel was a coming-of-age tale set in Tuscany, and her combination of easy tone, simple prose and an acute sense of where child and adult worlds collide have made her a growing-up specialist. In Lucky Break she has deliberately moved things on. By the end the characters are past 30, Dan has children, and Charlie feels her career is over. Yet the book stops short of writing in any detail about marriage and motherhood, the stage of life that Freud, a mother of three, has most recently lived through. Readers must hope she will one day write one of her sensuous, unsentimental stories about childhood from the parent's point of view. Until then, these fictionalised reminiscences of her own younger days offer a warm, sharp read.
