The Benefactors by Wendy Erskine review – a polyphonic portrait of class and trauma in Belfast

That we tend to regard the shift from the short story to the novel as a natural authorial progression perhaps speaks to a failure to recognise the shorter form as its own distinct discipline. Short stories are not novels in miniature, or parts of novels pruned to stand on their own. Without the luxury of space and looser pacing, they demand of the writer a linguistic precision and compression that, at its most radical, borders on the poetic, and which across the breadth of a novel would feel wearying. Novels need room to breathe. The writer expanding their scope therefore faces a difficult adjustment: guarding against density while ensuring they don't get lost in the space.
For Wendy Erskine, the move to a larger canvas feels entirely unforced. Her highly praised stories, collected in 2018's Sweet Home and 2022's Dance Move, often display a certain capaciousness, a willingness to wander beyond the single epiphanic moment that is the traditional preserve of the short story. Now, in her first novel, she revels in the possibilities of an expanded cast, yet controls the pace and framing with all the precision of a miniaturist. The result is a novel that feels like a balancing act: at once sprawling and meticulous, polyphonic and tonally coherent.
The Benefactors is ambitiously structured, but functions in some ways as a short story with a novel around it. At the book's heart is a pivotal, life-altering moment. Gracefully flowing into and out of it are the day-to-day lives that the moment both springs from and distorts, rendered in a tapestry of third-person narration and unattributed interjections of monologue – a kind of community chorus, commenting and adding colour. At the centre is Misty, a teenager who dreams of a career in special effects makeup, but who tops up her current job in a hotel by putting in the hours on Bennyz, or Benefactors, a camgirl site not unlike OnlyFans. Misty has a crush on Chris, the spoiled son of a wealthy businessman, but at a party in an Airbnb Chris and his friends Rami and Lineup sexually assault her. The trauma is Misty's, but the aftermath is dominated by the parents: Misty's adoptive father Boogie, Chris's stepmother Frankie, Rami's widowed mother Miriam, and Lineup's idealistic but ultimately hypocritical mother Bronagh, who runs a successful children's charity.
Erskine's great gift is for character. Not a single figure in this novel feels contrived; all are complicatedly flawed and empathetically rendered. In the novel's first third, Erskine juggles not only a series of perspectival shifts but also multiple, fragmentary diversions back in time, constructing from a mosaic of voices and moments both a convincing cast and a richly textured collective portrait of suburban Belfast – an array of pasts and circumstances deeply and believably integrated.
As the novel comes to rest in the present, Erskine draws for the communication of her characters' inner lives on her other most striking skill: the construction of warmly human dialogue on the page. In the book's most remarkable character, Misty's wonderfully abrasive grandmother Nan D, all Erskine's generous literary gifts find their perfect expression. Observe, for example, the sheer rhythmic poetry that careens across the page when Nan D, who favours a more direct form of reparation than the criminal justice system allows for, sardonically relays in beautifully cadenced sarcasm a cinematic fantasy of justice heroically upheld:
Misty could end up with one of those lawyers like off the films, a young underdog, nice long hair like your woman, can't remember her name. She's been in loads of things. From the wrong side of the tracks, underdog, but sees something in Misty that reminds her of herself, you know what I mean? And works night and day. In libraries at midnight and grafting grafting grafting. And she turns a whole jury around, our girl. And those guys are going down and their lives are just grubbed up for all time.
Boogie, too, is touchingly portrayed. The scene when, on hearing that Misty has been assaulted, he drives to the supermarket on the way to collect her from the police station and buys all the uncomplicated comfort he can think of – food, a dressing gown, orange juice – is, like much of this novel, poignant and true without ever being sentimental or manipulative. When Misty's sister Gen, who accompanies Misty to the police station, uses the word 'Dad' – just once, and entirely uneditorialised – the reader feels the weight of it without anything further needing to be said, such is the depth of the characterisation that has gone before.
As should be obvious by this point, there is no doubting Erskine's skill as a writer. The problem is that skill itself must be skilfully deployed – rougher textures allowed to show through the polish. Otherwise, the depiction can cleanse the subject of life. The Benefactors is a work of great assurance and precision, but by the end there is a sense that it has imposed its discipline and control on its characters, denying them emotional expansiveness. The novel's structure – the quotidian trickling towards the seismic, the seismic dissolving in turn back into the quotidian – makes a perfectly valid point about the processing of trauma in collective life, but it costs the story its impact. When, towards the end, a character finally loses their temper, allows themselves to be seized by the irrational, it feels less like a shock than a relief, as if they have shattered not just their own inner reservation but the constraints of the narration around them – a narration that circles a significant trauma, but somehow never quite reaches inside it, as if in fear of what might be found there, and how it might trouble the perfect surface of Erskine's creation.
The Benefactors by Wendy Erskine is published by Sceptre (£18.99). To support the Guardian order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

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