Lark and Termite

Lark and Termite
By Jayne Anne Phillips
Jonathan Cape £16.99; 272 pages
FT Bookshop price: £13.59

Jayne Anne Phillips’ latest work of fiction arrives weighed down by some very considerable praise. Raymond Carver, the American short-story maestro, once pronounced Phillips’ writing “unlike any in our literature”. Nadine Gordimer has called her “the best short story writer” since that other mistress of the genre, Eudora Welty. The list of people who have lauded her latest book include Alice Munro and recent Pulitzer winner Junot Díaz.

Lark and Termite, Phillips’ fourth novel, has high expectations to live up to. That it meets, and indeed surpasses, such expectations is only one of its many achievements.

The story is told in two inextricable parts. The opening pages drop the reader straight into a theatre of war. It is July 26 1950. Corporal Robert Leavitt, of the US army’s 24th Infantry Division, traipses wearily through steaming paddy fields in South Korea. Shipped out to Occupied Japan the previous year, he had been assigned to a special advisory team in South Korea only days before North Korean troops marched across the border.

Charged with escorting a column of South Korean refugees, Leavitt trundles ahead thinking of the wife he left behind – Lola, an elusive red-haired songbird, pregnant with their first child. Soldiers and villagers arrive at a railway line, and follow its tracks to safety. Up ahead, a tunnel beckons with the promise of shade. But as they approach, low-flying US airplanes strafe the moving huddle of fleeing men, women and children. Leavitt will be one of the many victims of this atrocity, known in history books as the No Gun Ri massacre.

Cut to Winfield, West Virginia, exactly nine years later. Here the focus is on Lola’s two children. The son fathered by Leavitt, nine-year-old Termite, is mildly hydrocephalic. Wheelchair-bound, and seemingly unable to communicate, he is caught in a sensory world of his own, in which sounds and smells acquire the vividness of colours and words. Lark, his precociously wise 12-year-old sister, is Lola’s daughter from a previous relationship.

Both have been brought up by Nonie, Lola’s sister, but it is Lark who cares for Termite while Nonie works at the local greasy spoon. She pulls him along in an old wagon, takes him to hear the boxcars pulling into the rail-yard, or to listen to the river’s murmur. She fantasises about going to the coast: “Taking Termite to the ocean has always seemed to me like taking one full space to another. The ocean is the biggest sound I could ever show him, bigger than rivers or trains.”

Nonie, like most adults, once thought of Termite as a liability. “He seemed the damaged mystery of everything I’d never finished with Lola, and the sadness of all that had gone wrong for her.” Lark knows better: “He doesn’t demand anything or communicate in the usual ways, but he somehow includes [people] in the way he pays attention, in his stillness. It’s how people feel when they look at water big enough to calm them, a pond or a lake or a river.”

The precarious family balance is tugged at on all sides. Social services employees demand that Termite be put into specialised care. Nonie hopes that Lark, who is old enough to attract the attention of local boys (and even some of the local men) will consider finding secretarial work – perhaps her only way out of this stilled and stifling life. Most of all, however, it is the mystery surrounding Lark and Termite’s mother, Lola, that threatens to undo the difficult domestic arrangement.

Weaving strands of story voiced by Leavitt, Nonie, Lark and even – in a feat that echoes Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury – the disabled Termite, Phillips depicts a universe of fleeting human attachments that is all the more precious for being so fragile. She does it with a prose that is as turbulent and overwhelming as the river that floods Winfield in the book’s closing pages, unearthing old secrets and new longings.

Machine Dreams, Phillips’ first novel, was a family tale bracketed by the second world war and the Vietnam war. Among other things, it offered a delicate study of the ways in which wars makes people old. Lark and Termite takes up this theme: “People forget that a soldier’s death goes on for years,” a family friend says to Lark, “for a generation, really. They leave people behind.” Here, too, is a reiteration of the folding intricacies of motherhood, the unfathomable mystery of birthing and bonding, as probed in Phillips’ third novel, MotherKind.

Lark and Termite is a demanding book, yet it repays the reader’s attention with rich seams of emotional revelation. There is much sadness in it, though just as much tenderness – beauty is somehow a salve for the loneliness and the devastation. This beauty begins with title’s simplicity. It is appropriate that the book should bear nothing more than the names of the two children at its heart. It is they, Lark and Termite, who reveal through their wide-eyed and hard-earned maturity that the world can be a less terrible place than it seems.