Tim Lott: 'As a child, I always sought my older brother's approval'

Tim Lott's new novel about sibling rivalry reveals traces of the fraught relationship he has with his own brother
Tim Lott
Tim Lott, photographed at home in west London, 19 March 2012. Photograph: Karen Robinson for the Observer Karen Robinson/Observer

Tim Lott's new novel, Under the Same Stars, began life as a memoir of an actual road trip he took with his older brother, Jeff, across Texas and New Mexico in 2008. "I had written 160,000 words, when I realised it really wasn't working," says Lott, sighing and shaking his head at the memory. "I had the basic structure but no real plot. There was no real alternative but to turn it into a novel, and it proved incredibly difficult to do so. It was like writing a book from the outside in."

The novel that emerged, Lott's sixth work of fiction, retains the road trip structure and, one senses, much of the fraught dynamic of the real-life sibling relationship. It also adds another level of familial tension by introducing a long-absent and now terminally ill father, whose first act of casual unkindness towards his sons was naming them Salinger and Carson in homage to his favourite authors, JD Salinger and Carson McCullers.

As the brothers journey across the vast open spaces of America to meet and make peace with their dying father, their relationship shifts from uneasy camaraderie to the kind of prolonged and effortless mutual misunderstanding that is characteristic of a certain kind of male sibling relationship that never quite transcends the familial roles established in early childhood.

"I think that all the slightly fraught nuances of my relationship with Jeff are still in there," says Lott, when I ask him about the thin line the book treads, not always lightly, between life and fiction. "We were actually on the road for a week and I taped all our conversations, which must have been intensely annoying for him. Likewise, my constant prodding, which centred around our childhood relationship. Put bluntly, my memory is that he was dismissive and hostile and I was always seeking his approval somehow. Not surprisingly, he just didn't want to go there and, when he did, he of course saw things very differently."

Lott, 56, was born in Southall in west London, and now lives in Notting Hill. His debut book, The Scent of Dried Roses, published in 1996, was a memoir concerning the aftermath of his mother's suicide. It is now a Penguin Modern Classic. In Under the Same Stars, he touches on his own experience of acute depression, the roots of which, he seems to be suggesting, lie in his childhood unhappiness. "There is a lot of psychotherapeutic writing that says sibling relationships are crucially important in the development of personality. As a younger bother, for instance, you kind of have to define yourself against your older brother at some point just to stake out your difference. It's complex stuff and it's kind of led to an obsession of mine that my own depression is somehow rooted in my early relationship with Jeff. He would deny that, of course."

I ask him if he is worried about Jeff's reaction to the novel and its not altogether flattering portrayal of the older bother, Carson, who, having lived in America for decades, has remade himself as a Christian, rightwing action man seemingly untroubled by the doubts and memories that have stalked his younger brother into middle age. "He'll be cool with it," says Lott, "as he would be cool with any book I wrote about our relationship. When I initially told him I was writing a memoir about him and me, he actually said: 'I don't give a fuck.' And that hurt a bit. So maybe I still do crave his attention."

Though Lott has written novels about working-class life during the Blair years (Rumours of a Hurricane) and the impact of surveillance (The Seymour Tapes), one senses that his abiding subject is the tricky terrain of family and self. There were times in Under the Same Stars when I felt the plot almost got in the way of the book's thrust towards self-exploration, particularly in the final section which hinges on the explosive truth behind a blurred childhood photograph. More than once, too, the sense of lived experience that lights up the conversations between the two long-estranged brothers made me long to read the abandoned memoir. For Lott, though, fiction is the thing.

"I worry about the state of the British novel. We seem very adept at well-wrought miniature novels. But no one is taking the kind of chances that American novelists like, say, Jonathan Franzen or Jeffrey Eugenides are taking. The English novel seems to have become very small and well mannered since Orwell's time."

In Under the Same Stars, the American landscape and the vast distances between places give Lott's writing style a chance to stretch out. "There's just such a grand sense of scale that you can't get here,'' he says, adding: "The drive from Wigan to Slough just wouldn't have the same resonance." At the heart of the book, though, is a very English protagonist, whose constant tendency to scratch away at the deeper meaning of things is, I suspect, an urge Lott knows all too well. "I guess I do hang on to a lot of stuff," he says, ruefully, at one point. His older brother would no doubt agree.