The Hunters, Claire Messud

A case of Canada rather too dry for comfort

Older readers who regret the demise of the cinema double bill may welcome the appearance of Claire Messud's two novellas, collectively entitled The Hunters. Younger readers will wonder how an acclaimed author in her mid-thirties can produce work that is so resolutely old-fashioned: cold, controlled and conservative.

The first of the stories, A Simple Tale, focuses on Maria, a Ukrainian enslaved by the Nazis in the Second World War, at the end of which she emigrates with her Polish husband, Lev, to Canada. There she enters a lesser form of servitude as cleaner to a series of wealthy, well-meaning women. Her dreams of a new life are shattered when her adored son, Radek, marries the sluttish Anita. The only person in whom she can confide her disappointment is her elderly employer, Mrs Ellington.

Messud expertly captures the mutual dependence of mistress and maid, a relationship of crucial importance to many that is rarely explored in fiction. Her descriptive writing, in particular of a trip to a lakeside retreat, is evocative. But her portrait of Maria's emotional life is remote and uninvolving. The story is stifled by the style. The reader is told everything and feels nothing. One is left to examine Maria as if she were a museum exhibit – at different stages but always from the same perspective.

The second story, The Hunters, moves from North America to England, more precisely to north-west London – indeed, the precision of the setting is its finest quality. Messud has a discerning eye for English socio-geographical boundaries and, in particular, the sharp demarcation between the gentility of Little Venice and the squalor of Kilburn, where the narrator, an American academic, rents a flat and is at first irritated and later intrigued by the downstairs neighbours.

The narrative is no longer third person – although it remains impersonal. Messud has adopted the Jeanette Winterson technique of leaving gender unspecified, which here adds little but obfuscation. Indeed, when the narrator returns to America and begins a new relationship with someone who is described only as "my beloved", the coyness becomes doubly alienating.

Although the second story, at least, acknowledges the fictive possibilities of its subject, it feels derivative, largely because Messud appears to have modelled it so closely on the style, content – and even the character – of Henry James.

This is evident in the prissy circumlocution of the prose and finicky choice of words (sojourn for stay, maquillage for make-up and so on), in the cultural confusion of an American abroad and, especially, in a narrator who – like the governess in The Turn of the Screw – ascribes motives to others that may simply be a projection of neurosis. But neither the relationship between narrator and narrative nor the unfolding of the narrative itself are of sufficient interest to maintain the reader's attention.

The reviewer's latest novel, 'Easter', is published by Arcadia