Flatiron
Review by Walter Cummins

The world of this novel is ominously dystopian—constant rain pounding a city of unmoored, vulnerable buildings, displaced people fearful of being flooded out of threatened dwellings, expectant that one day everything around them will be gone:
The neighbor’s house, when it goes, is almost nothing. Sudden slip and collapse, like a turned ankle, like something lost in mud. It slides some twenty feet, foundations shuddering, creak and groan of beams and grinding girders, upper windows falling out. No one is around to watch it go. No one but her—unevacuated, uncertain in the foundations of her own identical home—watching it go with her torch to the window.
In such a defenseless setting, the lives of the novel’s central characters, three estranged lesbian sisters—Isla, Irene, and Agnes—are additionally threatened by the potential loss of their personal underpinnings, each facing an emotional crisis at the death of their father, a famous, wealthy, and ruthless architect named Stephen Carmichael. Isla and Irene have the same mother, Agnes, ten years younger, is the child of a brief second wife who has disappeared from their lives. For these daughters, the torment of their father’s legacy is a constant psychic deluge.
Some critics have compared the novel to King Lear, but I regard that as limited, resulting from a powerful father with three daughters. In Shakespeare’s tragedy, the fate of Lear, the father, is the focus of the drama, the daughters essentially offstage. In this novel, the father is dead and all the attention placed on the condition of the daughters, who share little with Lear’s, particularly Agnes, the youngest, who is nothing like Cordelia. Inheritance does play a role, with Agnes surprised at being the chosen one. While love is an issue in the novel, it doesn’t serve as a parental test.
The narration is delivered through alternating sections devoted to each of the sisters, their individual fixations in the inundated world, the three forced together by a growing obligation for interaction, initially because they must plan for their father’s funeral, the practical necessity of cooperation clashing with the dynamic of the long-term acrimony. Several sections appear from the viewpoint of the city and just a few from other characters. But it’s the uncertainties of the daughters that matter most.
The novel opens with news of the father’s death, the bickering daughters soon assembled at a coffee bar, having to find a route to the hospital as they stand under an awning where they encounter “[t]he rain and the thick city smell that is reminiscent both of rot and of metal.”
Despite the overt animosities of the relationships, love serves as a central issue of the novel. Irene states it in one of her sections: “The problem has always been the way her father treated her mother, that he loved her and then ceased to love her, the way this withdrawal caused her first to unravel and finally to die. The problem has always been the way he left them alone in the house for long periods, the way he spoke to his daughters, the way he pitted one against the other.” Throughout, they can’t stop accusing and insulting their siblings, having gone months without speaking until the father’s death forces contact.
Of the sisters, Agnes is the one who falls in love despite her initial denial of the impulse. It’s with Stephanie, with whom she upsets Isla and Irene by inviting her to their father’s funeral. When Agnes realizes she loves Stephanie, she is unwilling to admit it to her: “Love, then, as something she should have clued into, a fact against which she’s been willingly blind. We love people before we notice we love them, but the act of naming the love makes it different, drags it out into different light. She looks at Stephanie and says nothing. Thinks, absurdly, that the words might be kept for a rainy day.” But where they live every day is a rainy day.
The culmination of the novel unites the personal dramas with a climactic torrent of the storm, the characters assembled in what had been the father’s house, the windows ultimately collapsing inwards, light lost, rooms quickly flooded, two sisters clinging to each other, desperate to reach the third.
Armfield brings in no father to shock the scene with “Howl, howl, howl, howl!” Her absent Stephen Carmichael is the cause of the disintegration, but for a very different reason from Lear. It is his daughters who must bear the price of his follies.
In Private Rites, although the city is suffering a collective demise, Armfield has created a thoroughly individualized set of siblings whose roles in the cataclysm serve as personal climaxes.