Tradition, parenting and ‘Jewishness’ are at the core of Tom Lamont’s debut novel

Tom Lamont, like the protagonist of his debut novel, is half-Jewish. My own children, like those of Groucho Marx, are too. Marx’s daughter was once refused entry to a swimming club by the antisemitic hierarchy and the comedian informed the powers that be she was half-Jewish before asking: “Can she go in the pool up to her waist?” On the day of publication, Lamont’s mother called to ask how it was all going before informing him there was no sign of the book in the local Waterstones. I didn’t need to ask the author which was his Jewish side.

It has been said that we are all Marxists of the Groucho variety and for Lamont, whose father was a lapsed Catholic, Jewishness is a way of seeing the world, “a strong, consistent background thrum”. It is not the in the foreground of his everyday life but was undeniably a huge part of his childhood and something he feels at the back of his brain since “religion can still be there despite the doubt”.

Childhood is central to Going Home, a remarkably assured debut novel in the mould of Anne Tyler from one of the founding writers on The Guardian’s Long Read desk. All those years writing and thinking about people and what makes them tick have clearly paid off, since the book’s characters feel so flawed, messy and human one almost expects to bump into them in the street.

The protagonist is Téo Erskine, the Enfield lad who has escaped the suburbs but finds himself back home and having to care for the needs of his ailing father and a two-year-old force of nature (is there any other kind of two-year-old?) while simultaneously being helped and hindered by his oldest and closest friend. There are shades of Mike Leigh, another Jewish artist whose religious observance ceased around the time of his barmitzvah, in the feeling that these characters had lives before the events depicted and will continue to do so long after the end.

Work on Going Home began in earnest in the autumn of 2021 and, as is so often the case, the author realised the specific is the universal as he was encouraged to “explore these strange Jewish borderlands” occupied by the members of his own family. The relationship between Téo and toddler Joel is inspired at least in part by Lamont’s relationship with his own son. As he explains:

“A two-year-old turning three is such a specific thing that you really have to have lived through that to have a reasonable shot at capturing it in prose. I was lucky that I took a lot of notes and I really paid attention from a parental perspective and an artistic perspective.”

Judaism, like childhood, is one of the novel’s key components. The push and pull of tradition and making your own way is at the heart of both the book and the psyche of many Jews. Through the character of Sibyl, the local rabbi, Lamont is able to explore a community that might pay lip service to change but ultimately remains resolutely stuck in its ways. Indeed, change in every sense is at the heart of Going Home, something that is utterly inescapable when caring for a young child. The writer has an apt comparison:

“There’s that trope in cop TV shows where there’s CCTV footage of the scene of the murder and the security guard regretfully informs them that the video tape resets every 24 hours and writes over itself. I feel like parenting is exactly that. You’re having to learn so many new skills in such quick succession that stuff fades.”

For the first time in his life, Lamont felt this was the novel he was supposed to write and worked on it for a solid year without interruption. As a seasoned interviewer, it was as though the characters were the subjects of his newspaper profiles and thus there was a duty of care when it came to writing about them. There was also a sense in which he was transmuting the experiences of caring for both his father and his son into the stuff of art. Muriel Spark (another half-Jewish writer) claimed art was “the transfiguration of the commonplace” and it’s hard not to agree when Lamont writes so beautifully about prosaic, everyday existence like playing football, taking a child to the playground, a round of poker, attempting DIY and the manifold other activities that occupy our daily lives. The result is a warm, humane book filled with humour that bears comparison with Nick Hornby or David Nicholls at their best.

In conversation, the author exudes a sense of serenity and calm not dissimilar to The Dude in The Big Lebowski as played by Jeff Bridges (a man Lamont interviewed not long ago). In the time he finds between journalism and family responsibilities, he is attempting to write his second novel, a book he had begun work on prior to the publication of the first earlier this month. There is a lightness of touch about Lamont combined with a fierce intelligence that is perfectly suited to novels and one suspects there are many more to come. Above all else, though, there is a curiosity and compassion for human beings and interrogating their motives across all of his work. It is impossible to guess exactly where that comes from but, like Going Home itself, it feels like there is something intrinsically Jewish about it.

Going Home is published by Sceptre, £16.99