A bawdy tale of parenthood told by a typical Carter (Saints and Sinners, 1986) heroine: witty, brash, and a sucker for farce who gives a story a good feminist spin. The septuagenarian Chance sisters, identical twins Dora and Nora, may like all wise children know their father, though the paternity has never been acknowledged, but they also learn here that after all these years they can't be too certain about their mother. Already busy on her memoirs, Dora begins her tale—told with all the innuendos and humor of the vaudeville comedians she once knew—on the day the sisters are invited to attend the hundredth birthday celebration of their father, the great Shakespearean actor Sir Melchior Hazard. The family bloodlines, Dora tells, were never all that clear: it has long been believed that a young lead—rather than aging grandfather Hazard, married to a much younger actress—was the real father of Sir Melchior and his twin, the lovable and rich Perry. It's also been believed that the eponymously named Chance sisters were the result of a liaison between their father and a young woman who died conveniently at their birth. Raised by the mysterious Mrs. Chance, the beloved ``Granny,'' the talented twins were soon dancing and acting in variety shows, having affairs with the great and not-so-great and- -the climax of their careers—making a movie in Hollywood, where Dora had an affair with a writer, whose resemblance to F. Scott Fitzgerald is quite intended. In between, Uncle Perry came bearing gifts; they met their father's three wives, and watched from the sidelines the goings-on of their half-siblings, whose own paternity is not all that clear either. An amusing romp through theatrical history that tries to answer but doesn't quite—the jokiness is ultimately too much and out of place—a serious question: What defines the true parent- -blood or the actual rearing? Accessible but thin.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-29133-0
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
This disappointing second novel from the author of Memory of Departure (1988) never quite gets off the ground, although the language is simple and appealing. The setting is precolonial north Africa. At the age of 12, Yusuf is taken away from his home by Aziz, a rich merchant, in payment for a debt of his father's. What follows is a series of events and episodes: Yusuf works in Aziz's shop alongside Khalil, a friendly and talkative young man who tells Yusuf he is also working to pay off his father's debts, although his father is dead; Yusuf is suddenly summoned to go on a journey ``to the interior''; Yusuf is left in the care of a couple who work him very hard; Yusuf is collected again by Aziz for a long and difficult journey. During their travels many men grow ill, and there are the expected hardships of life on the road with a caravan. There is much talk of the encroaching Europeans and a good deal of sexual teasing of Yusuf, whose physical beauty makes him an object of desire. But the whole adds up to less than the sum of its parts. Because Yusuf is young and naive, and the narrative—while in the third person—cleaves close to his impressions, it's never exactly clear what's happening. Larger cultural issues, and the setting itself, are difficult to see through the forest of minutiae.
Pub Date: April 1, 1994
ISBN: 1-56584-162-X
Page Count: 256
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1994
Manipulative but moving, for readers who don’t mind having their strings pulled.
Those with the patience to accompany the protagonist on this meandering journey will receive an emotional payoff at the end.
The debut novel by an award-winning British radio playwright (and actor) offers an allegory that requires many leaps of faith, while straddling the line between the charming and cloying (as well as the comic and melodramatic). The title character has recently retired from his office job at a brewery, lives with a wife who hasn’t loved him for decades—since their intelligent, perhaps disturbed son sparked her estrangement from her husband—and appears destined to live his life in everyday limbo until the grave. Then, one day, he receives a letter from a female co-worker with whom he had once been close but hasn’t been in contact for 20 years. She is dying from cancer and has written to let him know, to say goodbye. Without planning or preparation, he embarks on the title’s “unlikely pilgrimage,” somehow believing that if he can walk the hundreds of miles over the many months it will take him, she will remain alive to welcome him. On his journey, he meets a bunch of characters, becomes something of a celebrity and learns a little bit more about the meaning of life. These lessons are articulated in homilies such as “you could be ordinary and attempt something extraordinary,” and “Maybe it’s what the world needs. A little less sense, and a little more faith.” Maybe, but if such sentiments seem akin to those from one of Mitch Albom’s bestselling parables, the novel’s evocation of everyday British reticence, heartbreak and wonder occasionally suggest the depths of the great Graham Swift. The final chapters of the novel resolve the mysteries that have been underlying the rest—how the son divided his parents, why the co-worker had disappeared from Harold’s life—and there’s a powerful resolution in which all’s well that ends well.
Manipulative but moving, for readers who don’t mind having their strings pulled.Pub Date: July 24, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9329-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2012
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