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Lucky Break
By Esther Freud
Hardback (other formats)
RRP £11.99
Our price: £9.59
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Trade review
Synopsis
Book Details
| Publisher: |
|---|
| Bloomsbury Publishing |
| Publication Date: |
| 04-Apr-2011 |
| ISBN: |
| 9781408805824 |
Guardian review
the guardian Fri 29 April 2011
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.
Observer review
the observer Sun 27 March 2011
Lucky Break, Esther Freud's seventh novel, charts the diverging fortunes of a group of actors who meet as students at drama college. Basing an entire book on the professional tribulations of a group of self-involved thespians and then attempting to make their characters sympathetic to the casual reader is, it must be said, something of a challenge. If the popularity of the Luvvies column in Private Eye is anything to go by, most people view the tortured actor as something of a comic stereotype and certainly not one worthy of 300 pages penned by one of Britain's foremost female novelists.
But Freud's talent lies in her ability to make us care about characters with whom we might superficially have little in common. In Hideous Kinky, her semi-autobiographical account of a Moroccan childhood in the 60s, we found ourselves empathising with the hippyish mother in search of enlightenment precisely because of the flaws that made her fallible.
Similarly, in Lucky Break, Freud cleverly manages to immerse us so fully in the actors' claustrophobic world that our own perspective merges with theirs; all at once, it seems perfectly normal for someone's happiness to be shattered by a bad audition or for their self-worth to be demolished by an outbreak of acne. It is to Freud's immense credit that she has made a profession threaded through by fakery appear so indelibly and excruciatingly real.
As with Hideous Kinky, Freud mines her own experience for inspiration. She trained as an actress before becoming a novelist (even playing an alien in a 1985 episode of Doctor Who) and is married to the actor David Morrissey. There is, then, a sureness of touch when, in the opening chapters, she notes the youthful pretension of drama students, determined to embody the "Inner Attitudes" taught in a method-acting class. "Well, Adrift is sensing feeling," one of them explains earnestly in the pub afterwards. "With Inner Participations of Intending and Adapting."
Freud's narrative, which spans 14 years, centres on three characters: Nell, who is kicked out of drama school after her second year for not having the requisite talent and who gains her Equity card by appearing as a penguin in a touring school production; Dan, the heart-throb who has to balance burgeoning professional success on the small screen with the demands of a wife and children; and Charlie, the stunningly beautiful young woman catapulted into the A-list as soon as she graduates.
By tethering the plot to these three fixed points, Freud is able to chart the ebb and flow of unpredictable success without ever losing our interest. She never forgets that her prime duty to her readers is to tell a gripping story, and although capable of lyricism and insight a pint glass is "slippery with wet"; a girl's eyeshadow is made up of "variegated blues" her writing remains sparse and unpretentious.
She conveys both the elation of a first night and the anguish of a failed casting with such precision that your heart thuds along with the characters'. Every time kind-hearted Nell thinks she is on the verge of a breakthrough, you find yourself believing along with her, until it becomes painfully obvious, after a string of unreturned phone calls, that once again things haven't worked out. "Maybe," Nell muses at one point, "there is no such thing as a lucky break. Maybe you do well, or you don't do well, and that's how it is."
And yet, although Freud writes with passion and feeling about this peculiar world, she is able to keep a clear-eyed distance from some of its more ludicrous excesses. In places, Lucky Break is extremely funny. After a first-night production of Hedda Gabler, Charlie suddenly understands why actors talked "with such intensity. 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?"
Later, Freud trains her crosshairs on Amanda, Nell's big-shot agent who conspicuously fails to deliver. Amanda is forever draped in cashmere and twinkly smiles, her desk covered by vast bouquets sent to her by her boyfriend. Standing next to her in a lift, Nell notices Amanda's "whole self gleaming, her hair bouncing, her nails buffed". Outside, Amanda hails a taxi, leaving Nell standing dully on the pavement: "'Golden Square,' she ordered and she was gone."
Lucky Break is full of these pitch-perfect observations, spiced with wry humour. It is also a terrifically absorbing book, as authentic an evocation of the acting experience as you're ever likely to read. After you have turned the last page, the Luvvies column in Private Eye will never look quite the same again.
Elizabeth Day's Scissors, Paper, Stone is published by Bloomsbury






