Second Self by chloe ashby

the Times literary Supplement 21 july 2023

Chloe Ashby’s thoughtful second novel focuses on fertility and the choices women in their thirties routinely face over motherhood. Cathy, the heroine, is married to Noah, who is around a decade older and has decided he doesn’t want children. Mothers are everywhere in this book. There is Cathy’s best friend, her sister-in-law and her own widowed mother, Janey. Janey lives alone in Norfolk while Cathy – her only child – is in London; she appears to be slipping into dementia and this story line forms the other main strand of Second Self. Ashby implies that some of Cathy’s indecision over motherhood relates to the effective loss of her own mother to old age and disease.

Ashby writes with great fluency and is very confident in her evocations of Cathy and Noah’s middleclass milieu of Ottolenghi takeaways and almond bellinis. For all Cathy’s material comfort, however, this is not a smug novel, or a satire on smugness. There is plenty to fear here: infant mortality, Alzheimer’s, marital breakdown, ageing, death.

The author is an art critic and, as in her first novel, Wet Paint (TLS, July 1, 2022), her protagonist works in the art world. In Wet Paint, Eve becomes an artist’s model, partly inspired by Suzon, the barmaid in Edouard Manet’s famous painting “A Bar at the Folies-Bergère”, which she spends hours scrutinizing at the Courtauld Institute of Art. Cathy in Second Self works in the conservation studios of the National Gallery, where she has been tasked with restoring a Dutch Golden Age painting of a beach scene, working off the layers of overpaint on the canvas to reveal what has been hidden for so long. Ashby handles this metaphor for Cathy’s state of mind gently, though sometimes the link is explicit: “As I chipped away at the overpaint, I began to think again about my body and the way it sheds hair, skin, blood. The way it’s constantly changing and renewing, dead cells breaking away to make space for new cells to grow. ... For a moment, I imagined a layer of overpaint on my skull, cloaking any unsolicited thoughts.”

There is a tension in this novel between reflective prose and the urge to convey a certain amount of information about the central narrative concerning the egg-freezing process Cathy undergoes. For the most part, Ashby navigates this successfully. I hungered for a little more explanation about why the hormones injected during the process cause the body to mimic the signs of early pregnancy, but some minor obfuscation in the cause of not sounding like a textbook is understandable. The observational writing is generally of a high standard, though there are moments in which it is a little half-hearted: “I heard a sigh that made me think of the sea”.

Ashby should be applauded for the nuance with which she portrays the choices available to women, including abortion (handled here both sensitively and without drama). Cathy has an unofficial godson as well as nieces and a nephew, and there is an implicit suggestion that these circumstances offer her a way to parent, regardless of whether she is a mother herself. The relationships she has with her colleagues, friends and in-laws are deftly drawn, and the tact with which her female characters mention or don’t mention their fertility triumphs or disappointments to their friends feels authentic. Similarly authentic, without being overdone, are the instances in which her mothers good-naturedly complain about their lot.

This review originally appeared in The Times Literary Supplement