The Club

Annie Sparks is the longtime head of membership for the Home group, occupying an “odd space in members’ minds—a hybrid of superfixer, paid best friend, and put-upon PA” (16). This hybrid role highlights the instability of The Idea of Home in the novel since her role as “paid best friend” reflects the oxymoron of a paid-for “home” club. As a “striking” fashionista, she carefully cultivates her life-of-the-party persona with outrageous costumes. Nikki finds her “exhausting,” with “the shouting. The showing off. The pathological need to be noticed, as if she thought she might actually evaporate if ignored for thirty seconds” (55). This excess, too, is part of a calculated performance. When acting as interim CEO, she adopts a more understated demeanor and attire.

No one denies that Annie is exceptional at her job, but the conflict relating to her character results from her taking what Ned sees as undue credit. Annie reflects on the invisibility of certain (and gendered) forms of labor: “In some respects it was a mistake, as a woman especially, to be really efficient over a long period of time. Because if you made things seem easy, and people had no experience of things not running smoothly, it came to seem that anybody could do it” (113). While Annie is very different from the other women in the novel, Lloyd draws attention to their similarities when experiencing difficulties as a result of being “really efficient.” Many of Annie’s observations bear the same tenor. She loves her world but is also a sharp critic of it, giving the reader an intimate insight into its flaws.

Annie refuses to let go of this life and conspires to bury secrets and murder Ned (though Nikki gets there first). She winds up as Ned’s successor and fully intends to take over every aspect of Home, including surveillance and blackmail. Instead, Jess publicizes footage of Annie conspiring to cover up a drunk driving fatality. The reader does not witness the results, but Lloyd implicitly condemns Annie by allowing Jess to tell this part of the narrative.

Nikki is Ned’s PA. Beautiful but self-effacing, Nikki was a 15-year-old runaway sporadically working as a model when she came into Home’s orbit. Her background inured her to certain forms of abuse at the hands of her mother who had an alcohol addiction, and she can handle Ned’s tempers without “internalizing” them, but they have left her vulnerable to others.

Nikki’s work as a model exacerbated her desperation for recognition and acceptance. She remembers the thrill of coming to work at Home, “to see an actor from TV. To be talked to and smiled at by people at all, as opposed to being a model and just standing there in the corner of the room in your knickers and no bra while people talked about you at full volume” (185). Addressing The Idea of Home, Lloyd presents a subversion of a joyful homecoming in which Nikki moves from one abusive scenario to another. Both Ned and Ron Cox prey on her low-esteem and lack of protective guardians and groom her to have sex with Ron.

When Nikki encounters her biological son by Kurt, she reevaluates her past and Ned’s role in it. She doesn’t plan to kill him, but she doesn’t regret her spontaneous act. The unpremeditated nature of her action generates surprise in the novel’s climax: Her action undercuts the red herrings that Lloyd lays out for the reader regarding who murders Ned. She leaves Home’s orbit and decides to pursue a relationship with her child, whose courage and morality make her proud.

Adam has always idolized and emulated his big brother Ned. Ned filters both Adam’s perception of reality and his self-presentation: “Ever since he was a child, it had partly been Ned’s eyes and ears he had been looking through and listening to the world with” (97). This underpins the theme of Constructing and Revising Personal Narratives. Upon leaving for university, Adam anticipated “not the chance to reinvent himself, but to meet people who would not realize quite how many of his mannerisms and interests and even turns of phrase were borrowed from someone else” (98). Dominated by the stronger personality of his brother, Adam joins in his crimes as well as his business vision, slowly crossing one line after another. While the reader has insight into this point via Adam’s section of the chapters, other characters mostly encounter a version of Adam that Ned deliberately mediates while frequently humiliating and gaslighting his brother. Adam struggles to leave Ned’s orbit, and just as he determines to leave—even if that means having to take ownership of his infidelity—he is murdered in Ned’s place. One of his last thoughts is, “[W]hat a stupid fucking punch line […] to the stupid fucking joke he had made of his life” (253). He cannot escape Ned’s shadow.

Lloyd writes one posthumous “Adam” section, a scene at his funeral filtered through his wife. Laura finally insists on placing Adam centerstage. She sketches a portrait of a loving, attentive husband who leaves a hole when he passes. The reader’s final image of Adam is finally separate from Ned, yet it is still not a narrative that he himself tells.

Ned is the owner of Home Group and the novel’s main antagonist. While multiple characters take on antagonistic roles, Ned’s crimes and manipulations contribute to each storyline. His last name proves appropriate for a character who preys on the vulnerabilities of others. In the course of the novel, Nikki discovers that he groomed her as a 15-year-old girl for Ron Cox to abuse. Ned shows no remorse and lacks any empathy. The blackmail scheme began as a way to inject cash into Home Group but is “now as much about control as it [is] about cash. […] It [has] become a game—seeing how far he [can] push members until they snap[]” (149). Ned’s machinations are often perceived as a “game” or cruel “joke” by those subjected to them.

His obsession with control extends to his business operations. As a boss, Ned unapologetically insists on maintaining authority over every last detail. He cultivates his image as a brilliant but mercurial dictator, going so far as to react violently in Island Home’s manor house when its designers disappoint him. He storms about throwing things:

[I]sn’t that what power is? A middle-aged Rumpelstiltskin, jumping up and down, visibly out of breath, swinging on a chandelier, and no one daring to laugh. […] It was all part of the legend, wasn’t it? Ned Groom the visionary stickler. The volatile genius who had built an empire on taste (27).

Lloyd presents Ned’s self-image as a “legend” and a “visionary” to reflect his role as the constructor of narratives throughout the novel, both about himself and about those whom he controls or blackmails.