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An often hilarious, surprisingly moving portrait of a long-married couple, seen through the eyes of their wickedly observant daughter—for fans of A Man Called Ove and The Royal Tenenbaums.
Miranda's parents live in a dilapidated house in rural France that they share with two llamas, eight ducks, five chickens, two cats, and a freezer full of food dating back to 1983.
Miranda's father is a retired professor of philosophy who never loses an argument. Her mother likes to bring conversation back to the War, although she was born after it ended. Married for fifty years, they are uncommonly set in their ways. Miranda plays the role of translator when she visits, communicating the desires or complaints of one parent to the other and then venting her frustration to her sister and her daughter. At the end of a visit, she reports "the usual desire to kill."
A wry, propulsive, exquisitely observed story of a singularly eccentric family and the sibling rivalry, generational divides, and long-buried secrets that shape them. This is an extraordinary debut novel from a seasoned playwright with a flare for dialogue and, in the end, immense empathy.
Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!
Enhance Your Book Club
Select King Lear as a companion read to The Usual Desire to Kill and discuss the parallels between the play and Camilla Barnes's debut novel.
Research some general philosophical schools and concepts—existentialism, stoicism, nihilism; logical fallacies, vagueness, and "God is Dead"— and discuss the relative merits of adopting them as an outlook in your life.
Cast the movie, play, or television series of The Usual Desire to Kill. Which professional actors, or members of your group, could you envision playing the characters in the novel?
Unless otherwise stated, this discussion guide is reprinted with the permission of Scribner. Any page references refer to a USA edition of the book, usually the trade paperback version, and may vary in other editions.
Playwright Camilla Barnes has crafted a character-driven debut novel with little conventional plot, relying instead on the central family's complex relationships to drive the narrative: the parents, born circa World War II as members of the Silent Generation; their Gen X daughters, Charlotte and Miranda; and a Gen Z granddaughter, Alice. Although Barnes never explicitly labels them as such, she fully captures each generation's defining traits.
At the heart of the novel is Miranda, the younger daughter, whose observations provide insight into her parents' worn-out marriage. Alongside her are Charlotte, her older sister, and Alice, her daughter, minor characters who nonetheless add depth and perspective. Their presence underscores the central themes: the passage of time, the burdens of familial obligation, and the silent weight of unspoken histories.
A thin plot thread emerges through Charlotte's efforts to document the family's history, for which she enlists Miranda's help. But Miranda is reluctant. Her monthly visits to her parents' home feel more like an obligation than a heartfelt desire to spend time with them—a reflection of the same sense of duty that has shaped her parents' lives. This interplay of expectation and reluctant caregiving ties into the novel's strongest topic: the cyclical nature of familial roles.
The story unfolds over the course of these visits, spanning from March to July, with each month serving as a chapter. Barnes employs a mix of genres and formats to structure her narrative, weaving Miranda's first-person account with play dialogue, sections narrated in the third person (possibly the weakest moments of the novel, as they seem to serve as an easy solution to certain narrative challenges, such as resolving a "family secret"), emails between the sisters, and letters penned by their mother in the 1960s. Throughout the novel, this character remains unnamed, a choice that emphasizes how she is defined by roles rather than individuality, trapped within the identities of mother, wife, and grandmother. Her story is one of resignation: an unexpected pregnancy during her first year studying at Oxford locks her into a life of duty rather than desire or ambition. She follows the traditional route, because she cannot imagine not doing so.
However, despite being so outwardly traditional, the parents are eccentric in their own ways: after Miranda moved to Paris to pursue acting, they followed her to France, where they now tend to llamas, methodically number their chickens' eggs and consume them in order, play tennis in shorts even in January, and hoard objects in every corner of their crumbling home, which can almost be seen as a character itself, or, at the very least, as a metaphor symbolizing their aging, their stagnation, and the slow disintegration of their marriage.
Their conversations, full of English wit, are tinged with bitterness—not of fiery conflict but the exhausted, resigned exchanges of people who have stayed together simply because they don't know another way. They are captured through Miranda's observations and the theatre-like scenes in which Barnes showcases her background as a playwright; like Miranda, she also moved from England to France to work in theatre. Unlike her protagonist, Barnes has never been onstage, only behind the curtain: a position that has likely honed her powers of poignant observation.
The lightness of tone and other characteristics of English humor make for a deceptively fast read; many sections read like eavesdropped conversation. But beneath the humor lies a deeper, more melancholic feeling, as if the reader were a child hiding on the stairs, listening to their parents argue below. This sense is reinforced by Miranda's voice at the novel's start, which reads as unexpectedly childish. It is surprising to learn that she is nearly 50, but this seems intentional: her voice evolves over the course of the novel with an increasing cynicism, mirroring the inevitable shift in family dynamics as children become caretakers.
There are echoes of King Lear, the play Miranda has translated into French and is performing, in the way daughters take on the care of their aging (and eccentric) parents. But rather than a grand Shakespearean tragedy, Barnes presents a subtler, quieter meditation in her debut novel, an unravelling of family dynamics and obligations.
Reviewed by Alicia Calvo Hernández
Monica Ali, author of Love Marriage and Brick Lane
In 1951, Time magazine described the youth of the era in the following terms: "The most startling fact about the younger generation is its silence. With some rare exceptions, youth is nowhere near the rostrum. By comparison with the Flaming Youth of their fathers & mothers, today's younger generation is a still, small flame. It does not issue manifestoes, make speeches or carry posters." This explains why the generation born between 1928 and 1945 came to be known as the Silent Generation, an age cohort characterized by their strong sense of conformism and their traditionalism (another common term for this group is the Traditionalist Generation).
This generation is prominently represented in Camilla Barnes' The Usual Desire to Kill through the characters of the parents, Peter and his wife, who remains anonymous throughout, a choice that underscores her "silence." In a significant passage, she writes: "Who am I ... What part do I play? I have had no name but Mum for fifty years. Mum. I have just looked it up in Chambers Dictionary: 'Mum, adj. silent.— n. silence— interj. not a word.— v.t. to act in a dumb show.' Well, that about sums it up, doesn't it?"
Throughout the novel, we read the letters she sends to someone named "Kitty" in the 1960s, in which she recounts her time at Oxford studying literature, meeting Peter, becoming pregnant, and eventually accepting marriage as the natural course of action: "Well then. We had better get married" is Peter's response to the news. There is no rebellion, no questioning—just quiet acceptance, mirroring the generational attitude of taking life as it comes without resistance.
Both Peter and his wife embody the defining characteristics of those born during the interwar and World War II years. Peter, born in London in 1941, "could just about claim to remember the Blitz." His wife, born just after the war, laments having missed out on any defining historical moments: "She had been bequeathed the dullest bits—rebuilding, rationing, the grayness of the fifties. England had been left a smaller, poorer, grimmer place, an Empire on the decline."
The effects of wartime scarcity are deeply ingrained in their behaviour. In her letters, ration cards are mentioned. At the time, scarcity translated into rationing, and rationing later translated into thriftiness: hoarding became a defining trait of the Silent Generation, who, shaped by an upbringing marked by economic depression, tend to accumulate things with the goal of not being wasteful. The novel humorously illustrates this tendency through the parents' attachment to a broken-down freezer they transported from Oxford to France. Even after it no longer fully closed, they kept it for 20 years. When their daughters gift them a new one, it is not met with enthusiasm: "The morning conversation was about the new freezer (Boswell was much better, etc. etc.; you know the story...) and how wasteful the two of us are. ('It wasn't like that during the war; we never had sweets, or bananas or chocolate. It was jam yesterday, jam tomorrow, but never jam today')."
Reflecting on her grandparents' generation, Alice, their granddaughter, observes: "They had turned having to 'go without' into an art and they were destined to hoard all their life. They hoarded not only the present (anyone who stepped inside the larder would see that) but also the past with newspapers, photos, Christmas cards all kept, as well as more anonymous items such as old tennis balls, empty tobacco tins, and a large collection of floppy disks from the eighties."
While Alice has a smooth relationship with her grandparents, the same cannot be said for the daughters of Peter and his wife, Miranda and Charlotte. Their strained dynamic is rooted in the strict, emotionally distant upbringing typical of the Silent Generation: "Dad said, 'Children should be seen and not heard.' But what he really meant was 'not seen and not heard,'" Miranda reflects.
As members of Generation X (born between 1965 and 1980), Miranda and Charlotte adopt a less rigid approach in raising their own children, embodying a shift in parenting philosophies. This generational divide is part of the broader phenomenon known as a "generation gap," a term which emerged in the 1960s and 1970s to describe how Baby Boomers, and then Gen X, rejected many of their parents' values and beliefs.
Of course, people do not always adhere to the specific characteristics common to their generation, and these characteristics may vary based on geographical, socioeconomic, and other circumstances.
The Usual Desire to Kill is a novel about generational conflict. It sheds light on a frequently overlooked generation and examines how their characteristics shaped not only their own lives, but also their relationships with the generations that followed.
Child's ration book from World War II, courtesy of the UK National Archives on Flickr
Filed under People, Eras & Events
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