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My good fortune

February 19th, 2009 Lisa - Central

It is my good fortune to have discovered Margot Livesey’s The House on Fortune Street.  It has many of the things I love in a book: a London setting, allusions to British Literature, precise and lyrical language and a mesmerizing story.  Yum.

The titular house is owned by Abigail, who bought it with money inherited from an aunt.  Her best friend from college, Dara, lives on the first floor.  Dara is actually the center of the story - the three other main characters all have a connection with her.  The story is told in from the points of view of these four characters, yet is not the same tale told four times.  It’s a gradual unraveling of the lonely lives of the narrators, each one’s life illuminating the others.

It begins with Sean, a Keats scholar, who has just moved in with Abigail - who pursued him so relentlessly that he left his wife for her.  He is having difficulty with the last section of his dissertation and he easily drops it when he gets a contract for a book on euthanasia.  But right after he moves in, Abigail almost disappears from his life; she is furiously trying to build a new theater company.  While Sean is temporarily distracted by the interviews he does for his book, his loneliness is palpable.

We hear next from Cameron, Dara’s father, of his life while married to Fiona and raising his two children.  A lovely man - he is a wonderful husband and father - he has a secret flaw.  A dabbler in photography, he finds himself drawn to the photos Charles Dodgson - Lewis Carroll - took of Alice Liddell.  His life is changed forever during a camping trip when his flaw is suddenly revealed.

Dara, a therapist for a woman’s center, moved into an apartment in Abigail’s house in order to have a private place to bring her new boyfriend, Edward.  She met Edward much like Jane Eyre met Mr. Rochester - while she was quietly drawing a river scene, Edward fell at her feet.  Dara becomes overly devoted to him - canceling dates with Abigail and others to be with him.  Her dependence on men dates back to the same aforementioned camping trip.

Lastly we hear from Abigail.  Raised by parents who seemed just like Jeanette Walls’ in The Glass Castle, she moved constantly when she was a child, so much so she barely went to school.  She was grounded by visits to her grandparents every summer.  Her grandfather, a German immigrant, stressed the importance of school and read to her from Dickens - the author he read to learn how to be English.  She met Dara in college; Dara took her home on holidays and gave her the family she so needed.

Livesey has created some fascinating characters here.  The connection each has with the British authors enriches each person’s narrative.  Though there is lots of loneliness and sadness in this novel, it is filled with a certain hopefulness, well, for most of them.  Great novel.

Entry Filed under: Literary Fiction