Tangled Roots is Sue Guiney's first novel. A gentle and redeeming tale of family conflict and physics, it is written from the perspectives of John, a leading Boston academic, and Grace his mother who gave up her career to become a clichéd Jewish housewife.

The narrative shifts between these different voices, occasionally converging to relate different parts of the same tale before dividing up once more. New chapters introduce quantum theories such as Black Hole, perturbation, m-branes and string to elaborate on the events unravelling within, despite John's claim that 'we were physicists, not philosophers. We didn’t need to answer these questions... we just needed to make the numbers work'. As the book winds back and forth through time and space, visiting New York, London, childhood, old age and Moscow, we discover that we are in the end all interconnected. John has to go to Russia to realise this, Grace just by sitting atop a rock watching a fox who tells her 'I'm a part of you and you're a part of me'.

This is a carefully constructed, carefully researched book which, judging from the acknowledgements, took years to write. Sue Guiney conjures small things such as lobster rolls or the sea or a New York taxi or the English countryside with a detail ringing in truth. It is also carefully written, which sometimes become too stilted as her characters speak in the first person. There is an awkwardness to John in particular, who never seems to have been fully mastered by the author, who stumbles on with attempted naturalism and repeats variants of 'to be honest' and 'to tell the truth'. His journey of self-discovery, from pill-popping and mathematician's block, to rediscovering his roots in mushroom soup and a Russian synagogue, while also formulating a groundbreaking equation, is a little forced, as if this is what is needed to keep the plot going. He only comes alive when discussing baseball, the glint of the all-American kid finally shining through the hero, and there is a comically familiar moment as he sits in bed in his Moscow apartment at 4am wearing a Red Sox cap, listening to the World Series in the radio. Even his affair with a student, however, is somewhat perfunctory, devoid of purpose or consequence, as if it was put in just because that is what attractive university professors, even scrupulous ones, do.

Sue Guiney is far more comfortable writing in Grace's voice, and Grace herself evolves into a more complex person. Hers is not a journey to be travelled but to be explored, as she chats from the grey fug of a rest home at the end of her life, delicately peeling away the most painful parts of her, including her baby's death, her daughter's plane crash, husband's infidelity, sister's cancer and her own suicide attempt. The shift from vibrant publishing editor and girl-about-town to possessive mother, then months of silence in a hospital after an overdose, is related simply. The ordinariness of her pain, the nothingness felt and her eventual regeneration contrast with the cloak-and-dagger politics and meaning-of-the-universe stuff which seem to occupy her son.

Sue Guiney is an American writer who has made London her home, however, this book has some American traits. Few British writers, for example, would write about a mind-expanding encounter with a fox in wild countryside or describe its 'olive-shaped eyes... clear, piercing' and the 'definite communion (which) took place between us' without being conscious that comparisons (usually uncomplimentary) will be made with laureate Ted Hughes, for whom the fox held particular resonance, padding through his poetry like a totem. The fraught soul-searching and consequent positivity of the work is another very American characteristic. But Sue Guiney also displays a personal style which, like that of a watercolour artist, is at its best depicting everyday events such as sitting on a log or cooking. She paints in the blues and greys of life, as when she evokes the numbness of an act like suicide, which is rarely the screaming tragedy served up in films. Tangled Roots is a tender, drifting, life-affirming novel, probing into the quiet spaces and blanks where brains become most active. Even John's strokes of genius come 'Not in a hurried flash of inspiration, but quietly, as if they were sneaking up on me....' Tangled Roots is one for a long trip or a rainy day, or as a present for someone who needs it.

(c) Philippa Tatham 2008

Reviewed 20 June 08 / London

NOTES - Tangled Roots, first published in 2008 by Bluechrome, hardback, written by Sue Guiney, is in print and available from bookshops. Website - www.bluechrome.co.uk. Price - £12.99. ISBN 978-1-906061-40-1.