Constance, by Patrick McGrath – review

Patrimony and infidelity are defining themes of the Anglo-American relationship, as they are of Constance, a novel with alternating narrators: Sidney Klein is English, in his forties, and an authority on Romantic literature. Constance Schuyler is American, 22, and believes her father hates her. Their new marriage enters crisis when Constance’s family reveals her origins in a Lady Chatterley-like tryst between her English mother and the groundsman at the family’s Hudson Valley estate, who committed suicide before she was born. (Did her parents know that ‘Constance’ was Lady Chatterley’s first name?)

New York in the 1960s hosts a tale dense in literary and historical allusion. Anglo-American themes are complicated: Constance loves London, Sidney prefers America. Sidney admires the American revolutionary Nathan Hale, Constance in childhood taught her little sister to spit on their father’s bust of Franklin Roosevelt. A surfeit of characters with German surnames further unsettles questions of Anglo-

American kinship.