Books by and for independent women

Perfect Lives by Polly Samson

With her first collection Lying In Bed receiving widespread acclaim, Polly Samson‘s new book. Perfect Lives, was hotly anticipated by the literary press.

We are given a collection of connected stories centred around the Idlewild family, who are a privileged set with a beautiful house in an affluent seaside town, magnificent piano, marriage and children. Of course, the title of this collection is laden with irony, and their lives are not as perfect as we might assume.

Certain moments scream ‘modern fiction’ – talk of Ipods and mobile phones, detachment through technology. It’s a shame because some of the most memorable passages are about old pianos, family history and tie-dyed fabrics; we don’t need the references to texting and online dating to let us know that we are reading about modern families, although a mother’s anger at her daughter’s tattoo stained ankle is bitterly amusing. The Idlewilds are outwardly privileged, but crumbling within – each page turned reveals a dark secret or a painful revelation. An author whose work is frequently praised as ‘delicate’ and ‘nuanced’, Polly Samson is undoubtedly a skilled writer, one able to destroy a pure and wholesome image as quickly as she has created it.

However, the daily tribulations of dysfunctional, privileged families in Perfect Lives left me cold. Whilst I did enjoy reading the book, I was largely unmoved by the familial relationships. What I found most beautiful – and what has lingered in my mind – was the descriptions of increasingly obsessive loves for objects of art and creation: a piano tuner’s eagerness to get to the house with the perfect piano and his sadness at encountering a ‘lost cause’ warped with damp; a woman’s illicit affair with a camera and her breathless discovery of photography.

But despite individual shortcomings, the threads connecting the stories in Perfect Lives are deftly woven – rather than shout about the references to previous stories and be heavyhanded about the family ties, Samson allows a delicate familiarity to wash over the reader. You feel lulled into these not so perfect lives.

Samson is also a lyricist, having collaborated with husband David Gilmour on a number of Pink Floyd and solo tracks. Lyrics and short stories are happy bedfellows – both paint a detailed picture with few words and can express in a handful of sentences what some writers can labour over for hundreds of pages. Whilst this collection didn’t move me as I thought it might, there’s certainly a lot in there to be discovered.

Published by Virago Press, Perfect Lives (hardcover) is available on Amazon for £8.47.

Alex Herod