The Usual Desire to Kill by Camilla Barnes

Published by Scribner on April 1, 2025

The Usual Desire to Kill is a domestic comedy with five characters: Mum and Dad, their daughters Miranda and Charlotte, and Miranda’s daughter Alice. The story is told in a variety of styles. A series of letters from the mid-1960s explain how Mum and Dad came to meet and marry. Emails exchanged by the daughters in 2019 share their exasperation with their parents. Snatches of life are dramatized as scenes from a play. Parts of the story are narrated by Miranda, although Charlotte occasionally finds her voice. The scripted scenes add little to the story, but the storytelling techniques are mixed with a director’s desire to keep the story moving.

In a series of letters from 1963, “Your Loving Sister” tells Kitty about her dating life, including unsatisfactory sex with DK (for Dog Killer) and no sex with a more appealing American named Looey. YLS gets pregnant by DK and marries him, not because he wants her baby or even because he wants her, but because he has a sense of duty. As YLS relates, “I didn’t love him, but we did have a sort of understanding. I thought we would grow into each other.” They adapted to married life because “he changed all on his own — he mellowed; he taught himself how to pretend, how to deal with other people. He has learned to act.”

DK agrees that he has learned to act. During his marriage to YLS, DK internalized the lesson that all married men joke about: the secret to a happy marriage is to tell your wife that she’s right about everything. Later in life, DK will say that he used to hate liver. What he means is that YLS served him liver while assuring him that he likes it and, for the sake of marital harmony, he agreed with her. “Wives dominate while husbands submit” seems to be the theme of their marriage until the reader discovers that DK finds subversive ways to maintain his independence.

The story begins in France, where Mum and Dad have lived for the last thirty of their fifty married years. In France, nobody ever refers to Mum and Dad by their actual names, a choice that reflects the way they have cemented themselves into familial roles. Miranda describes her Dad as “a retired philosophy professor who never loses an argument.” Dad describes philosophy as “a mix of pedantry and common sense.” He challenges his family with amusing pedantry throughout the novel, but he also offers good advice to Miranda about dealing with her mother and with her own future.

Miranda’s description of her childhood captures her parents and their marriage:

“Over the years they had evolved a well-rehearsed technique for living together. It was a two-hander play, but there was also a bit part for me. Like two pieces of a broken plate that didn’t in fact fit together and never had, they used me not as glue but more as a translator; I often found myself communicating the desires or complaints of one to the other.”

Dad often fails to turn on his hearing aids, the better to ignore Mum’s opinions, advice, and instructions. He seems more comfortable communicating with the ducks and llamas on their property. “He didn’t interfere in their lives, in the same way he didn’t interfere in his daughters’ lives. He was just not very good at being interested in other living creatures, particularly if they only had two legs.”

Miranda and Charlotte endure their aging parents for short periods. Miranda is nearly fifty and Charlotte has passed that landmark. Their visits are more than obligatory — the women want to keep in touch with their parents — but they are always stressful. Mum has strong opinions about placing knives in the dishwasher.

Mum needs hip surgery but she doesn’t want to talk about it. “Not that she complains; she doesn’t. It’s more like spectator martyrdom— moving in a certain way to make sure that I notice and feel sorry for her and then, if I ask, denying that there is anything wrong and doing sod all about it.”

If Mum spends a few days in the hospital, perhaps Dad can unwind. And perhaps the daughters can use the time to get to the bottom of an event in their childhood that they never understood. The true identity of “Kitty” is another of the story’s surprising reveals.

The hidden family secret is tame by modern American standards. I suppose things were different in England a few decades ago. In any event, the novel doesn’t position the reveal of the family secret as the story’s climax. It’s just one of several moments that merit a soft chuckle. I’m a bit weary of sedate family comedies, but Barnes’ pointed prose made me chuckle so often that I have to recommend The Usual Desire to Kill.

RECOMMENDED