The opening chapters of All God’s Kids move down a street. A woman drives home too fast with a pregnancy test in her handbag. Not half a mile away a man lies awake beside a wife he can no longer satisfy and works out what he is going to offer her. A little further on, a constable in his second year is failing to stop thinking about who his wife is with.
None of them know each other. All of them are, that week, having the same argument with their own life.
Why three
One couple gives you a case study. Two gives you a comparison, which readers will immediately flatten into a right way and a wrong way. Three is the smallest number that stops a novel from being a lesson. With three, the reader has to hold several incompatible sympathies at once, and that is roughly what living among other people actually feels like.
Every marriage in this book contains an arrangement the neighbours would not believe. So does yours, probably. So does mine.
It also solves a practical problem. A story about a single household under strain becomes claustrophobic very quickly. Cutting between three lets each crisis rest while another develops, and it lets the reader notice rhymes the characters cannot: the same fear of being left, the same terrible politeness, the same conversation about children happening in three kitchens on the same evening.
The convergence
Ensemble novels live or die on whether the strands come together for a reason or because the author needed them to. The joining points here are the ones that genuinely join people in an English town: a hospital, a police station, a courtroom, a church. Institutions are where strangers are made to stand next to each other.
By the last chapter the three couples are friends, which is not something any of them would have predicted in chapter one. They have been through the same year without knowing it, and the only place large enough to hold all of them at once turns out to be a church on a Saturday afternoon, with a photographer going round in circles.
