Introducing her fifth novel, The Exhibitionist, Charlotte Mendelson told Marlborough LitFest audience, “Marriages are fascinating, families are fascinating.” The novel was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2022 and was The Times Novel of the Year 2022. Mendelson commented, “I’m really interested in partnerships where usually the woman is the handmaiden to a very difficult man. It’s often a very long marriage and no one quite dares to stand up to him.”
In The Exhibitionist Ray Hanrahan, patriarch and famous painter, is that difficult man and is about to have his first exhibition for years. His wife, Lucia, a sculptor, who was his student at art school has been expected not to pursue her own career and to concentrate her efforts on being a wife and mother. “Lucia’s life-long secret is that she’s never managed to get rid of her ambition to be an artist in her own right. The longer you are in a situation the harder it is to leave,” says Mendelson. “I like writing about people under pressure. The novel starts at the moment events take over and Lucia has to decide what to do.”
The tight framework of the novel – everything happens over a weekend, between Friday night and Sunday late morning “ramps up the pressure on everyone.”
Mendelson is also interested in “roles within families and how we as adults either rebel or conform to what we were brought up with.” In the novel Leah, one of the daughters who is in charge of the exhibition is “essentially married to her father.” It is through Leah’s list of her father’s dislikes the reader glimpses Mendelson’s dark humour. Ray dislikes: “cathedral towns; shrubs; supermarkets; wall-paper; exercise; the county of Essex; people who take A-levels; teachers; Scotland; Wales” the list goes on.
“One of the greatest joys of being a novelist is you get to make yourself laugh,” says Mendelson. She still laughs every time she reads an extract in one of her other novels – Daughters of Jersusalem which is set in Oxford and depicts a bumbling academic who gets his beard caught in a hawthorn bush. “I think I make jokes about dark things. Life can be very difficult but also hilarious. I don’t want to write sad books but to lovingly laugh at how ridiculous some things are.”
Mendelson is a keen gardener and gardening correspondent for the New Yorker. Her newest book, recently published in paperback is Rhapsody in Green. And it was in Barbara Hepworth’s sculpture garden in St Ives, Cornwall, that Mendelson first had the inspiration for The Exhibitionist thus creating the character of Lucia, a sculptor.
Mendelson describes herself as “unvisual”. “I’m interested in what people eat and what it feels like physically to be them and where they live.” She draws plans of the homes where her characters live in order to work out the domestic logistics and spends a lot of time thinking about what items would be in their kitchen, even what sort of mug they would be using.
The Exhibitionist was read on BBC Radio 4 a few weeks ago and is still available on BBC Sounds. In an exclusive reveal to Marlborough LitFest, Mendelson’s new book – Wife will be published next August. “You heard it here first!”
Golding Speaker Sebastian Barry at Marlborough LitFest 2023
