Book Review: Loved and Missed by Susie Boyt

By Simon Demetriou

During the christening of her granddaughter, Ruth, the protagonist of Loved and Missed, tries to calm the rage welling up inside her at the fact that her daughter, Eleanor, had been using drugs while pregnant by reminding herself of a line from one of the ‘sermons’ she gave the girls to whom she taught English: ‘Read every day – it is a practice that dignifies humans’. This small marvel of a book is a lesson in how love, whether it misses the mark or not, is the ultimate dignifying practice, in part because it is the emotion that most often pushes us into and draws us out of despair.

The love that missed is that between Ruth and Eleanor. Full of Ruth’s tender recollections, Boyt uses these in her narrative as a brutal counterpoint to the pain of failed maternal love, the horror of realising that you were ‘cohabiting with someone who despised you, who thought you quite a few rungs lower than human. Bracing, that. A particular species of domestic violence.’ The resolutely English understatement of ‘bracing’ to describe the beginnings of the great misery of Ruth’s life, the attempted detachment of the scientific ‘particular species’ – both are emblematic of the stoic, wry, immensely damaged but still unbroken narrator who is a truly special accomplishment by Boyt.

The love that hits the mark is that between Ruth and Lily, the granddaughter whom she effectively kidnaps as a newborn after coming to the realisation upon taking Lily (who had been living with Ruth prior to the christening) and a roast chicken over to Eleanor’s house on what was meant to be a celebratory handing over of the child, that ‘The main thing, the only thing, was to leave the chicken and to keep the babe.’ Ruth does just that, and spends the rest of her life devoted to Lily, determined to give her ‘the most anyone could give’ but haunted always by Eleanor’s cutting description of her mother possessing ‘a genius for disappointment’.

When we get to the final chapter and see just how much Ruth’s love and care and devotion have meant to Lily, I defy anybody to not have to – at the very least – blink away a couple of tears. This reader sobbed. It sounds like a cliché to sum up a book by talking about how powerful the idea of loving, despite indifference, despite doubt, despite time and age and depression and fear, is – how loving another can sometimes destroy but always redeem. But read Loved and Missed and you’ll see what I mean and why it’s as fresh a message as it ever was when handled by a writer with this degree of skill.