1989: What a year, right?

You will recall 1989 as the year of the fatwa against Salman Rushdie and the death of the Ayatollah Khomeini. Perhaps you remember where you were when you heard about the Exxon Mobil disaster or the debilitating stroke of playwright Phillip Prys.

If you're feeling a bit guilty about not remembering that last, don't worry. It's not that you've forgotten or worse, that you simply weren't paying attention to the torrent of news in the first place (though you could be forgiven if you were). It's because Phillip Prys is fictional, a character in Kate Clanchy's new novel, MEETING THE ENGLISH.

Against the backdrop of such major tears in the social fabric, the world hardly ripples at news of the Welsh writer's stroke. He was prominent, to be sure, in the 60s, and he's managed to get his play, The Pit and its Men, taught in a handful of secondary school English classes. But this is 1989. A cusp year, a terrible news year, a year just before the Internet, and Prys' plays were kind of misogynistic anyway. I mean, The Pit and its Men? Writing about the coal- soaked victims of industrialization is so Beat Generation -- best minds destroyed and all that. Much sexier these days, the last of this decade, to read Rushdie's work -- "One Hundred Years of Buggery and Midnight's Arses," as Prys grumbles just before the tumor lodges in his brain.

Those closest to Prys can hardly be bothered. His fourth and current wife, Shirin, must focus on her opening. An Iranian ex-pat with lovely hair and small feet, Shirin is a painter of post-modern miniatures. Prys' second wife and mother of his children, Myfanwy is only concerned with securing Prys' money. Jake, their son, is an attractive budding playwright but blows his chances on blow, and his sister, Juliet, bears 20 extra pounds and her father's disappointment that she hasn't lived up to her namesake.

Unsurprisingly, such flawed (but dynamic, carefully crafted) characters, when faced with a near-vegetative, kind-of-famous playwright, decide to place an ad for live-in help. In Cuik, Scotland, an eager young English teacher presses the ad into the hands of his most promising student, Struan Robertson, who realizes Cuik's closed mines and closed minds aren't offering much. He applies and gets the job.

Clanchy's main concern here, as the title implies, are her characters. She pushes them up against each other and against the year's current events as butterflies on a corkboard. The result is beautiful, colorful, so precise. Good characters interest us. Great characters surprise us, and these characters do. As they muddle through their liminal year Clanchy considers gender dynamics in the art world, eating disorders, what it means to care for someone, greed, decay and so much else. She stays true to the rhythms of everyday life and the strange, often conflicting motivations of real people. MEETING THE ENGLISH is a lovely book. You meet the English, you meet yourself.