May 23, 2025

The Names, by Florence Knapp

I was swept away by Florence Knapp’s novel THE NAMES a book that came on my radar when UK. bookseller Katie Clapham made it her book club pick. I was besotted by the premise: a mother in 1980s’ England walks to the registry office after a giant storm to register the birth of her son, a child is who intended carry the name of his father and his father’s father before him. But the child’s father is a monster, and so the mother makes a last minute switch and gives her baby a name chosen by his older sister. Or else she makes a different switch, and names the child herself. Or else she goes along with the original plan, naming the baby for her abusive husband as she’s expected to do, and the narrative rolls out in three different threads with what transpires with these different choices. The choices not just about the name the boy will carry—we encounter him and his family at seven year intervals throughout the next four decades—but the novel is so much more richly textured than that, being also about everything else that happens around him, especially his father’s responses to the different things the mother has done in choosing the names that she has and the different narratives that are put into motion, oftentimes unstoppable. (This book is tough to read in places. Imagine how many times the average novel might break your heart, and then multiply it by three. OOF.)

The NAMES recalled Kate Atkinson’s LIFE AFTER LIFE, another novel about fate and chance, and flaps of butterfly wings, and about how it’s impossible to ever get life completely right no matter how many opportunities you have to try. This is true especially in the novel’s depiction of domestic violence—there is not a single choice the mother will make that will ever be the right one. But in a more general sense, life is like that for everyone, every good outcome occurring with something else that’s lost, or other unseen consequences. To be in the world at all is only wild and capricious, risky, amazing, and awesome at once.