JESSICA FRANCIS KANE Rules for Visiting. Reviewed by Jessica Stewart

Jessica Francis Kane’s second novel delves into the nature of friendship in an age of social media.

With a light touch, Kane has written a funny and moving novel that is a study of many things, chief among them friendship. What does friendship give us? How do we nurture our friendships? When a bee stings, it will die unless the barb is gently removed. Kane asks, how do we remove the barbs that arise in any relationship in order to protect it, and us?

May, a botanist, works at a university on the East Coast of the United States, tending the grounds. She moved back home some years past for reasons that are unclear and has stayed on, living with her father, a retired professor who now occupies the basement flat in the family home. About to turn 40, May is triggered by the milestone to go on a search for something she feels is missing, to find out things she has not understood. May has neither husband nor children, but though their absence is noted by others, these are not part of May’s quest; neither is the deep sorrow she holds for her mother, whose fate is kept mysterious until close to the end.

Instead, May is motivated by memories of an article about a woman her age, with a similar life trajectory, who had been killed in a plane crash 15 years earlier, leading to a vast outpouring of grief. Posts on a specially set up website (pre-Facebook) were not only from her many friends, but also from people who might have passed just a few hours in her company and now mourned that they would never befriend this special person.

What was obvious in post after post was that Amber had a talent for friendship which, I suddenly understood, was something one could be good at, like cooking or singing.

May wants to know what this is and she decides to travel to visit four of her friends, staying for several days with each.

This is a radical idea. As she muses to herself, ‘Can I see an average day in your life right now?’ No ‘being in town so dropped in’, no movie, dinner, or excursion. This is visiting for its own sake. The tension is palpable when her friends try to discern her intent, but May’s openness, her lack of guile, allows for a window so they can see each other truly in real life (IRL), not the selves they’ve curated on social media.

The changing state of friendship in these days of social media is a theme in much contemporary fiction. ‘Likes’, trends, emoji choices, and the fallout from an opaque post all feature here too, but Kane has some fresh observations.

Two women behind us were talking, one of them energetically describing a recent trip until the other said, some impatience in her voice, ‘Yeah, I saw all this on Facebook.’
The friend stopped talking. ‘Oh, right,’ she said.
Here’s a question: If a friend tries to make conversation out of a social media post you’ve already seen, do you let her? Consider it, because new material can be awkward.

Kane also evokes our coy relationship with artificial intelligence, and the incursion of Siri or Alexa into our lives. In one particularly comic scene, May finds Hello Barbie, the new doll belonging to her friend’s daughter, tucked into her bed.

When I pulled back the covers, she spoke to me. ‘Yay, you’re here!’ she said. ‘This is so exciting. What’s your name?’
‘May,’ I said, against my better judgment.
‘Fantastic,’ Barbie said. ‘I just know we’re going to be great friends.’
I wondered if I needed to cover her head to turn her off. ‘How do you know?’ I said.
‘I can just tell that you’re a nice person,’ Barbie said thoughtfully. I was silent.
‘You’re welcome, Barbie said happily.

May’s work as a botanist is detailed in some lovely passages, particularly the acquisition and nurturing of a cutting from a famous yew tree. A different tree also features at the beginning of every chapter. May’s father is looking for a suitable memorial tree that he hopes the university will plant when he dies and he clips notes and leaves them in strange places for May to find. Her reflections reveal his quirks as well as each tree’s virtues.

Throughout, Kane’s perceptivity about how we relate to each other astonished me. Among many things, May muses on the rightful place of a neighbour; the usefulness of a diversion (ice cream in America, cake in Germany); the tortured language parents use (and how children see through the artifice); and the component parts of ‘likeability’: has she got the equation right?

Rules for Visiting moves quickly, with its short chapters shifting between May’s life at home with her father and her visits to her friends’ homes. Like me, though, you may want to slow the pace and savour it all.

Jessica Francis Kane Rules for Visiting Granta 2019 304pp $29.99

Jessica Stewart is a freelance writer and editor. She can be found at www.yourseconddraft.com where she writes about editing, vagaries of the English language and books she’s loved.

You can buy Rules for Visiting from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW here or you can buy it from Booktopia here.

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