SOMEBODY ELSE'S LIFE

by Morris Philipson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 18, 1986

A caper novel cum mid-life crisis novel: an engagingly light blend of forms and the most commercial yarn yet from Philipson (A Man In Charge, Secret Understandings, The Wallpaper Fox), who does double shift as the director of the Univ. of Chicago Press. Philipson creates a sympathetic and believable protagonist in Stephen Cooper, a 50-year-old bachelor academic who, while visiting his millionaire brother, is thunderstruck by the revelation that his tidy academic life has cloistered him from the power and beauty that money can buy. In hopes of escaping his scholarly prison through best-sellerdom, Cooper begins a novel about the successful forgery and sale of an actual artifact, a leather wall-hanging once belonging to Catherine of Aragon and now missing. But his art-restorer girlfriend, another finely realized character, persuades him to accomplish the forgery for real, with her help. What follows is a step-by-step exposition, fully persuasive, of the creation of the forged wall-hanging and its false provenance, and of new identities for the budding con artists. Posing as an elderly aesthete named Leslie Egmont, Cooper enjoys a wild freedom as he indulges in a quick affair with a lonely widow and then sells the hanging to a museum curator who, although aware it's a forgery, plans to sell it in turn to an unwitting client. Flaunting his new wealth, Cooper visits his brother and--in an unfortunate coincidence, one of several planted by Philipson--is shocked to see the hanging: his brother was the curator's mark. His familial honor lost, he returns home to find his girlfriend packing, having learned of his affair. With nothing of value left in his life but a half-million from the sale, he disappears into Europe to forge a new identity as Leslie Egmont. Although Philipson relies too often on happenstance to gird his plot, this offbeat romp intrigues with its ironic probing of life values at the same time that it provides lively entertainment.

Pub Date: Feb. 18, 1986

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Harper & Row

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1986

Categories: FICTION