NATURAL ELEMENTS

Life is hazardous for a newly institutionalized mother and her risk-taking financier daughter in this contrived novel by Mason (Us, 2004, etc.).

Eloise McAllister loves her elderly mother Joan, up to a point. That point is reached when Joan becomes too frail to live alone. Rather than having her mother move in with her, Eloise installs Joan in the Albany, an expensive South London nursing home. As a sweetener she pays for a vacation to South Africa, the place Joan left years before to study music in London. Joan wants to investigate her Boer heritage and is thrilled to find the diary of her grandmother, a survivor of a British concentration camp set up during the Anglo-Boer War. Back in London, she hates the Albany and Sister Karen, the smarmy disciplinarian who runs it. Eloise has problems of her own. She makes a good living as a hedge-fund broker in metallurgical commodities and has bet heavily on osmium, based on encouraging predictions by her former lover, the brilliant French physicist Claude Pasquier. But a scientific article has cast doubt on osmium’s industrial applications, and the price is tanking. Eloise’s job is on the line. What if she can’t pay the Albany’s bills? Joan is not helping. Her innocent hallucinations of piano pedals have progressed to full-scale delusions involving a sadistic concentration-camp doctor. Also in the mix are Joan’s dead husband and mother-in-law (she hated them both); Eloise’s black-sheep brother, fresh from Australia; and Pasquier, Eloise’s lover again after his marriage to an American collapses. Mason’s lack of control over his material is compounded by his ambivalence toward Eloise, one moment the hard businesswoman, the next the fundamentally decent daughter.

A family drama made unmanageable by disparate plot threads.