Charlotte Mendelson

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CHOSEN families are not always what we would choose in the long term, and the children of chosen families can sometimes have very little choice.

Charlotte Mendelson is a skilled chronicler of toxic family politics, and in Wife throws in the added complications of lesbian parenting combined with the insecurity of academic life. It could be depressing, but it’s very funny and sharply observed.

Zoe, a junior lecturer in classics, is an expert on Greek drama but that doesn’t help her when her home life starts to resemble something from Sophocles’ wastepaper basket. In her mid-20s, shy and awkward, she can hardly believe her luck when her much older colleague Penny snaps her up.

Penny is glamorous, sophisticated and elegant, and above all sexy. Zoe moves into Penny’s home while the pillow is still warm from Penny’s ex. Justine is apparently fine with everything, Penny says, and is living in the basement with her brother, because their mother owns the house.

That’s the first red flag among many. It’s Tiananmen Square on May Day as Penny alienates Zoe’s parents and friends, and becomes jealous when Zoe’s career starts to accelerate. Zoe’s concerns about privacy and respect are dismissed as British uptightness by Penny, who is from the Australian outback.

Despite these teething troubles, they have a daughter apiece, with the same father (a terrible choice, and they choose him twice). He is as controlling as Penny so there is even a stand-off over the receptacle used for the conceptions. They become Mummy and Mama, with Daddy having a scrupulously fair (on paper) slice of the cake), and build a family together until their elder daughter is 15.

This novel is set on the fateful day when Zoe prepares to move out, with alternate chapters revealing what has led her to this point with chronological flashbacks.

The “Now” passages describing her packing in rushed half hours between seminars and a final visit to the mediator are desperately touching: “school reports stolen from the filing cabinet, a slithering wodge of baby pictures… If only she could chisel off a section of the girls’ pencilled height-marks in the hall”.

As she criss-crosses London dodging transport disasters and mortal enemies, Zoe summons the strength to take on her adversaries (“all it would take is a push”).

Two Greek choruses gather force throughout: one is composed of the friends and ex-lovers Penny has assembled, plus their child’s father with his spreadsheets detailing access arrangements, plus at one point Zoe’s own parents, and is intended to show Zoe the error of her ways. (“You did the damage. You must realise that. Everyone can see it, why can’t you?”). The other chorus features the many professionals the couple have encountered: family therapists, couple therapists, teachers, mediators. In the middle of it all, Penny wails and rants like Clytemnestra having a bad day.

The novel is set in West London but these are the sort of people you see berating each other on Hampstead Heath. Mendelson lived in Dartmouth Park for years, started her publishing career living in Bloomsbury and is a regular at the Owl Bookshop, so north London is in her blood.

The daughters are spectacularly let down by some of the professionals. Dazzled by dealing with a lesbian couple and a biological father, and apparently unwilling to criticise, they fail to question whether the access system works for the children. It’s left to 12-year-old Matty, the younger daughter, to say that she doesn’t want to be “sliced up like a bagel”. As Zoe nears breaking point, there are signs that Penny’s juggernaut narcissism is visible to others, but nobody can stop it.

At times I wanted to scream at Zoe to Get Out Now, but she has to find out for herself. The will-she/won’t-she tension is played out until the final curtain.

• Wife. By Charlotte Mendelson. Mantle, £18.99