The struggles of siblinghood: a deep dive in Rachel Joyce’s latest novel

RACHEL Joyce understands a common angst of middle age: the feeling of being stuck.

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The characters in her six novels - including The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry and Miss Benson’s Beetle ~ blossom only after leaving the familiar behind.

And, as in the works of Anne Tyler, each of Joyce’s novels is so entertaining that it is easy to forget the darkness that underpins the story.

In The Homemade God, Joyce tries something different. She has not one but four protagonists, and the point of view moves from one to another, chapter by chapter.

This complex structure is somehow more satisfying and more frustrating to read than if she’d told the story in a more straightforward way. Readers get to know these four siblings so well that they may want to shake them and shout, Buck up! Stop drinking! Grow a spine!

The siblings, in their 30s and 40s, are the offspring of a bombastic, hard-drinking and very successful artist named Vic Kemp.