Books of The Times
Uncorking One Family’s Secret

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI in The New York Times
Published: November 9, 2007

Graham Swift’s lugubrious new novel, “Tomorrow,” (Knopf/Picador) is told in the voice of an Englishwoman named Paula Hook silently addressing her children. Unable to sleep, Paula worries about what is going to happen the next morning: She and her husband, Mike, have decided that tomorrow is “Doomsday” or “Bombshell Day,” the day they are going to tell their 16-year-old twins, Kate and Nick, a family secret that “will change all our lives.” Mike and Paula have dreaded this moment for years: Earlier this evening they planned a “terminal supper,” and “made love in a special, a poignant, a farewell way.” As the narrator sees it, the ordeal to come is her husband’s “real moment of judgment,” and she tells her children that they will be in a position to “decide in his favor” or not. She says she has no idea how Nick and Kate will react to his news: “I picture a bomb going off and this house falling to bits. I picture everything remaining oddly, precariously, ominously the same. An unexploded bomb. It still might go off — next week, the week after, any time.” The big secret, which seems pretty obvious to the attentive reader early on, is revealed about halfway through the novel — and this is fair warning to readers who would prefer not to know: that Mike is not the twins’ biological father, that they were conceived by artificial insemination, using an anonymous donor’s sperm.

Paula acts as if this were somehow a deeply embarrassing secret, as if fatherhood has more to do with genetics than with love and the daily rituals and responsibilities of rearing children. Although the novel takes place in 1995, the 1990s were hardly the Dark Ages — adoption and artificial insemination were hardly shocking concepts at the time — and given the close, affectionate relationships Paula and Mike have enjoyed with their children for years, it seems bizarre that she thinks that their revelation may destroy their family:
“Listen to your father, he’s got something important to say,” she says. “And then he’ll be nobody, he’ll be what you make of him. If you want, you can even tell him to leave.”

Because its central premise feels so contrived, “Tomorrow” quickly devolves into a portentous, stream-of-consciousness monologue that sorely tries the reader’s patience. Whereas Mr. Swift has proved himself a masterly ventriloquist in earlier books, like “Last Orders” (1996), which movingly recounted the story of several working-class men carrying out the dying wish of a friend, he not only fails to find a plausible voice for Paula in this novel, but also inadvertently turns her into a self-absorbed drama queen.

For that matter, the premise that Paula is addressing her “angels,” her “pair of shrimps” is quickly torn to shreds as she prattles on about her and Mike’s sex life: the first time they made love, how they’d “flail and tussle” under a crimson bedspread, the way they regarded their pet cat, Otis, as “an undeniable erotic addition,” watching “sphinxlike and voyeuristically” as they tumbled about in the sheets. Who talks to her children this way? Who talks to her children about “lust for your father, for your father’s body”? Who tells their children in great detail about a one-night stand with the local vet?

The reader quickly realizes that Mr. Swift is ineptly using Paula as a sock puppet for his own purposes, and in an effort to build suspense and engage, even titillate us, he often puts words in her mouth that sound implausible, if not downright ridiculous.
When Mr. Swift — er, Paula — stops trying to build up the momentousness of the next day’s talk and stops trying to persuade her children (or the reader) that she and Mike have had a passionate sex life despite Mike’s low sperm count, the results are considerably more convincing.

She does an evocative job of conjuring their hand-to-mouth life during the 1960s and ’70s, and their gradual segue into bourgeois suburban comfort, as Mike trades his job as a biologist — studying snails, no less — for a job overseeing a successful science magazine. She conjures the dense underbrush of extended familial relationships that nurture and undermine their little nuclear family, and she conjures the mundane happiness she and Mike and Nick and Kate have shared day to day, month after month.

But the very palpability of the Hooks’ happiness and contentment works against this novel’s larger design, undermining Mr. Swift’s supposition that this family could be blown to bits by a little revelation about DNA.

· Secrets and Lies (October 7, 2007)
· Nobody's Perfect (May 4, 2003)
· BOOKS OF THE TIMES; A Lovesick Gumshoe Who Is Willing to Wait (May 2, 2003)
· Graham Swift's 'Last Orders' Receives the Booker Prize (October 30, 1996)
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For a UK perspective here is The Guardian review.