The formula of the story of three generations of women in a family is a good one. However, it has been done often, and it feels all too familiar. In Stuart Nandler’s novel we have grandmother Henrietta, recently widowed, her daughter Oona, going through a divorce, and granddaughter  15-year-old Lydia, who is struggling with bullying from people in her boarding school after a nude picture of her is distributed by her ex-quasi-boyfriend. The title of the novel is the title of the book Henrietta published when she was young, which became a bestseller. It was a quasi-feminist novel with lots of sex and now she is deeply embarrassed by her association with the novel. Unfortunately for her, she needs money, and the only real option left for her to get money is to capitalize on the novel. Oona is a feminist academic married to a man who won’t take responsibility.

 For the most part, the narrative focus switches between Henrietta and Lydia, while Lydia’s story gets told through her mother and daughter. The grandmother is not close to her granddaughter, but they are occasionally thrown together and they manage to learn from each other. Henrietta has some wisdom for Lydia, who is being slut-shamed for a picture that was stolen from her phone, and Henrietta’s own experience shows that just because she is old, this does not mean that she is irrelevant. She spends a lot of time reminiscing about her dead husband, a passionate man who worked as a chef but lost more money than he made.

The main insight of The Inseparables is about the experiences teen Lydia goes through as she is cyber bullied by the girls from her school, upsetting her enough to make her want to leave it. Nandler does a nice job of building in some feminist analysis of this without being too heavy handed. Henrietta’s marriage has all sorts of problems that bear scrutiny, and of course the overlap between the problems of these three women with the men in their lives is prominent. It’s not so clear that the work hangs together extremely well: it is a bit scattered and there isn’t really much drama. But it is an enjoyable listen nevertheless. The audiobook is performed with great consistency by Caitlin Kelly, Lauren Fortgang and Suzanne Toren — although it is told in the third person, different chapters are very much from one of the women’s perspectives.

© 2016 Christian Perring

Christian Perring tends to prefer novels aimed at a female readership than ones aimed at a male readership, despite being cis male. Go figure.