In the Fold, by Rachel Cusk

Lions and lambs in a field of dreams

The Hanburys hold legendary parties that go on for days, spilling all over their rough mountain domain and involving fireworks, seductions and intrigues. Michael, friend of Paul and Audrey's student son Adam, is bowled over. Invited to celebrate the 18th birthday of Adam's sister Caris, the narration of this impressed undergraduate souses everything in meaning. On first encountering a Hanbury tableau, he notes that "in their somatic presence I discerned wells of motivation, as though bored into the ground beneath them". A sweetly romantic kiss with Caris in a circle of oak trees puts the seal on his fascination.

Years later, Michael has married into a self-consciously arty family, in its own way as eccentric as the Hanburys. His father-in-law swears obsessively, his mother-in-law exists "as though she lived in a frame and were perpetually making pictures there". Between them these two manics have produced Rebecca, a daughter so violently self-analytical that Michael's marriage has been clouded from the start. At a point of crisis, Adam invites him to stay at Egypt for a week to help with lambing. Michael takes with him his three-year-old son Hamish, a stolid child, obscurely damaged and artlessly appealing, who refuses to talk. With the re-appearance of the original cast, now older and bearing the baggage of life, the scene is set for a final tableau, one that will shatter illusions and reveal the worm at the core of a very diseased apple.

This novel is a close, uncomplimentary look at unpleasant people. The characters are not endearing, but what shines in Rachel Cusk's writing is the sheer precision of her observation, the way she can pinpoint something profound with the merest detail: the way Vivian pronounces Madrid with "an accent of severe authenticity", the way Adam, nudging towards middle-age, looks like "a less fortunate relation of the Adam I had first known".

Cusk's creations are never trite. Everything is multi-layered: character, landscape, relationships. The effect is of a density which sometimes defies easy analysis. Strange, then, that Cusk draws the book to a close with the risky device of belatedly introducing a new character, who proceeds unconvincingly to psychoanalyse the whole book.

Perhaps the point is to cap a sharply observed parade of pretension, but it doesn't quite work. As Paul Hanbury says, explaining why some people don't like Egypt: "They find something false in it... and they start to get ironic. I don't like people being ironic - to me it means they've forgotten how to be natural." "Natural" is what everyone is desperately trying to be in this book. Yet nobody is.

Carol Birch's 'The Naming of Eliza Quinn' will appear from Virago in November