Customer Reviews

The House on Fortune Street LP: A Novel

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Spoiler Alert

I loved this book. It's a page turner but it's also a writer's dream. It does what every great novel does--makes you see the world in new ways through your sympathy with its main characters. You become attuned to Cameron's soul before you know that his fantasy life is filled with sexual attraction to pre-pubescent girls. By the time you learn what he loves, you already love him. (It helps, of course, that he doesn't act on his feelings.) Dara, his daughter, is needy and bereft, but can't love what she needs. She gives her heart to self centered jerks, and you, the reader, want to weep with her for her repeated mistakes. Her best friend, Abigail, is surprised at how easily Dara forgets her friends, her family, and anything that might actually help her, when in love with a man. Abigail herself finds romantic love evasive, until she falls, hard, and bends all her powerful will towards, Sean, the object of her passion. Her actions, viewed from others' points of view, seem a bit cold and calculated. But when the story turns to her point of view, you want to cheer her on, and you understand, finally, what drives her. Sean, the first one we meet, but the last one I got attached to, is more subtle and confused than the others, but ultimately, the most honest and honorable of them all. His section of the story, among other things, teaches you not to jump to conclusions.

This is a story about the varieties of love, but it is also a story about how "time and chance happeneth to us all." If Cameron hadn't come back to the tent at that exact moment, his passions would most likely have remained a secret forever; Dara would not have been and therefore felt abandoned and Cameron would not have lost his first family. If Sean had not re-met Valentine that particular afternoon, Sean might never have met Abigail, and been induced to end his marriage. For as Sean points out, marriage is "a plea for patience on the part of those involved, and for mercy on the part of bystanders." Abigail had no mercy at all, because Sean is the first man she ever really wanted. If, if only. Time and chance are as fateful in this novel as character. How much is character, how much chance, we are left to judge for ourselves. If you put a gun in someone's hand, how responsible are you for what happens if he shoots it?

I think this is a great novel and I plan to give it to all of my friends for Christmas.

The House on Fortune Street is the best, most absorbing novel I have read all year (and as I have been on a sabbatical, this has been a year of passionate novel reading for me).

The House on Fortune Street isn't a thriller or a whodunit, but at its heart is a mystery. As I read, I found that I felt more and more like a detective, gradually figuring out what has happened and why. I can't remember the last time I felt so engaged in this way by a novel.

The story is set mostly in contemporary London and revolves around four characters, each of whom has his or her own section, and story. When the novel opens, three of the four main characters are living in the house on Fortune Street: Abigail, an actress, owns the house and she and her boyfriend, Sean, a graduate student, live upstairs; Abigail's best friend Dara, a therapist, lives in the garden flat. The first part of the novel is told from Sean's point of view as he struggles to finish his dissertation on Keats, and also struggles with his finances - a crucial issue between him and Abigail. Only near the end of his part did I realize that, like Sean, I hadn't been paying enough attention to what was really important: his neighbor, Dara's, despair.

Dara is in many ways the main character in the novel and it is her story that we are figuring out. The second part of the novel is told from the point of view of her father, Cameron, an ardent amateur photographer who ruins his life, and Dara's, by taking a fatal photograph. In the third part of the novel we hear from Dara herself. And finally, in the fourth, from Abigail. By the time I reached the final pages these four characters truly seemed like people I knew and cared about, and I realized that part of what made them so appealing is how much they are like the people in my own life: complicated, surprising, exasperating, loveable.

There is another aspect of this novel that I really loved: each of the main characters has a famous author who acts as a guide to her or his secrets. For Sean it's Keats. Cameron's guide is Charles Dodgson, aka Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice in Wonderland. And so on. I loved learning more about these authors, and I felt that their presence really deepened an already wonderful novel.

I'm sure this novel will stay with me for a long time--just like the work of the great writers that Livesey invokes. Livesey herself is one of our very best contemporary novelists and the House on Fortune Street is an absolutely beautiful, moving, truly impossible-to-put-down novel.

Until now, Eva Moves the Furniture was my unqualified favorite of Margot Livesey's works - it has a quiet loveliness that, for me, is shared only with Norman MacLean's A River Runs Through It and Brian Kitely's Still Life with Insects. However, The House on Fortune Street, with it's multiple parts and viewpoints and narrative voices and literary allusions is, by far, her richest, most ambitious, and most successful and satisfying work. The four principal characters' stories are woven tightly and seamlessly together to form a powerful narrative that never feels contrived. The allusions are similarly rich, but never depend upon a reader's familiarity with 19th century literature.

I appreciate Mr. McDonald's thoughtful review, but I respectfully disagree strongly with him - in particular his statement that the novel `starts over in a new setting, with a new cast and a new problem in each part'. As I mention above, The four related parts refract the characters and plot elements in various ways, and, in so doing, create a complex, compelling moral and psychological texture. Livesey never waivers in her focus, in all of the sections, on the principal characters. Finally, aside from my essential disagreement with his assertion that `These people are always eating', I would point out that preparing and eating food actually consumes a substantial proportion of the time that we're not working or sleeping or (for many people) watching television.

I'm a long-time fan of Margot Livesey, I've read all of her books, and this is the first time I've been moved to review a book on the Web.

Margot Livesey's "The House on Fortune Street" is a complex and moving tale about love, loss, and human frailty. Sean Wyman leaves Oxford and his wife, Judy, to be with Abigail Taylor, whose greatest passion is the theater company she founded. Although Abigail professes to adore Sean, he rarely sees her, since she spends countless hours wooing patrons, coaxing actors, identifying promising playwrights, arranging tours, and doing whatever she can to make the Roustabout Theater a success. Desperate for money and making little progress in his dissertation on Keats, Sean agrees to co-write a handbook on euthanasia with his old university friend, Valentine. Living downstairs from Sean and Abigail is Dara MacLeod, who met Abigail when they were both students at St. Andrews. Dara is a compassionate woman and a talented artist who works as a counselor in a woman's center. She has an uneasy relationship with her father, Cameron, who abandoned the family abruptly when she was ten. Dara, who is emotionally fragile, has never been lucky in love, and she longs to have a satisfying relationship with a man whom she can care for and trust. At the age of twenty-six, Abigail received an inheritance that enabled her to buy the house on Fortune Street in London where she lives with Sean and Dara.

This intricately constructed book is divided into four parts, focusing on Sean, Cameron, Dara, and Abigail's stories, respectively. Sean comes to question his decision to leave his wife when Abigail's obsession with her work consumes more and more of her time. Cameron is hiding a shameful secret from Dara that could further damage their already strained relationship. By chance, Dara meets a handsome violinist named Edward Davies, with whom she would like to settle down. Abigail, who is the daughter of capricious and unreliable parents, left home at fifteen and, by dint of perseverance and hard work, made her own way in the world. She has never stayed with one man for long, and her relationship with Sean eventually begins to fray.

This is an elegantly written, literate, and thoughtful look at the many ways in which people delude themselves and others, making terrible choices that they later regret. The author suggests that, for better or worse, we are largely products of our upbringing. Although we may believe that our childhood traumas are behind us, they still play a part in the way we behave as adults. In addition, no matter how close we are to our loved ones, coworkers, and friends, we can never fully understand their underlying motives, thoughts, and feelings. Also serving as a motif throughout the novel are literary works, including "Mrs. Dalloway," "Great Expectations," "Jane Eyre," and "Alice in Wonderland," each of which parallels some aspect of the story. Finally, Livesey poignantly demonstrates how vulnerable we are to betrayal, sudden illness, bad luck, and unforeseen events that have the power to destroy our equilibrium. "The House on Fortune Street" is a profound, ineffably sad, and heartrending work that reminds us just how precious and ephemeral true happiness is.

At one point in Margaret Livesey's excellent The House on Fortune Street, one of her characters points out that how we handle our inappropriate desires reveals much about us and that statement is true for the four main characters in the novel. Livesey tells the story of three people living in the Fortune Street house--Sean, his girlfriend Abigail, who owns the house, and her friend from university, Dara--as well as Dara's father Cameron. The novel is divided into four sections, each told from one of their perspectives. With each section, the reader comes closer to understanding the true motivations of the characters, the truth of the lies they tell to themselves and to others. Each one of them deals with their own inappropriate desires--among them infidelity, pedophelia, suicide--some act, others don't. The characters' lives intertwine cleverly, entertainingly and the narrative is full of rich images and wonderful observations. I enjoyed this novel a good deal; it was hard to put down. Enjoy!

The House on Fortune Street is a dazzling accomplishment! With consummate skill and sensitivity, Livesey intertwines the stories of her characters, revealing lives that come to seem both psychologically predestined and utterly, startlingly, subject to the whims of fate. This is a gripping novel that yields immediate pleasure and also lingers in the mind, leaving one wondering anew about the vicissitudes of love and the curses and blessings of life.

This is the best work yet from a terrific novelist. The book has four sections describing four different versions of the same events as experienced by the four main characters , who are related by blood, marriage or friendship . Each character's temperament and personal history colors his or her experience of the same event. I was amazed by the psychological insight and the breadth of Livesey's empathy. The searing honesty of it's investigation into the relativity of morality and perceived reality are presented with memorable power as are her depictions of sexual politics, The large structure is effective, and clear but what moved me most were the offhand riffs and insights into our sad ignorance of others motives . Sentences of stunning perception and nuance occurred often enough to be termed "amazing". They hit me to the quick. Livesey delves into the mysteries of intimacy and otherness in a way I rarely experienced in literature and in a way which shined a light on aspects of my own experience. All this without obvious moral judgment or preachiness What a rare gift.!

In a novel that is all about the power of luck, two childhood friends are torn apart by catastrophe. The young and brittle Dara is a compassionate social worker who mentors at a woman's center in central London. Dara has spent much of her adult life frantically searching for true love and happiness and perhaps even marriage with her two-timing boyfriend, Edward a violinist who made his living teaching and who is living with his former girlfriend and their 2-year-old daughter.

Even as Edward refuses to commit, Dara remains somewhat irrational over her reasons, for feeling so insecure, her hopes for an easy intimacy with Edward always so out of reach. Adding to her turmoil is the strange and somewhat fractured relationship that she has with Cameron, her distant father who mysteriously deserted Dara when she was only ten. Her skills as a councilor certainly haven't made her own life any easier.

As Dara tries hard to mask her longing for Edward, constantly living like a soothsayer, poring over signs and omens, always apparently convinced that he will make good on his promises, she tries to build an independent life for herself living in the downstairs flat in the house on Fortune Street, owned by her best friend Abigail.

The fiery and independent Abigail, however couldn't be more different from the emotionally frail Dara. While Dara is shaped by the belief that childhood influences shape your psyche and your adult life; Abigail has been molded by her ambition and her belief that if you work hard you could control almost everything, including your feelings. A rather self-centered girl, Abigail has spent much of her life pursuing her own physical and emotional needs, never quite understanding how her best friend could be so needy for a man to make her happy. Abigail, given her history has always been a complicated mixture of stinginess and generosity. Haunted by her own parents - her athletic, mercurial father, and her charming, sylphlike mother, life for Abigail has been all about the struggle for survival and moving out and having to support herself when she was only fifteen.

Although the friendship between Dara and Abigail remains at the core of Livesy's beautiful and engaging novel, there are two other characters who constantly circle around them - Abigail's boyfriend Sean, who has a passion for Keats and who as the novel opens, is being employed his friend Valentine to write six chapters of handbook for euthanasia; and Dara's father, Cameron, who has struggled to shield his inappropriate desires throughout much of his life. Although Cameron has always felt responsible for his brother Lionel's death, it is only through seeing a copy of Alice in Wonderland with an essay about Charles Dodgson that he begins to glimpse some dark, aberrant corner of himself: "for the first time I knew there was someone else like me, someone else whose desires didn't fit into any appropriate category."

It is Livesy's intricately structured association of the lives of these four characters that propels this narrative forward to its devastating conclusion. Sean is baffled by the demise of his marriage to his wife, Judy and is plagued by an irrevocable closing down of certain possibilities. He worries about Abigail's sudden "busyness" where she never seems to have a moment, "there was always a patron to be wooed, an actor to be coached." Now the natural channels of communication between him and Abigail, those "glittering lively streams that has begun to flow at their first meeting," are clogged with doubt and disagreement, and forced underground. Cameron must deal with the split from his wife Fiona and the shattering of family's dream, his clandestine urges finally driving a wedge into their marriage. Luckily though, Cameron survives, a truly wearied soul who is healed with time and circumstance, the façade of propriety remaining somewhat intact as he is forced to make a new life for himself in London. Surprisingly, it Cameron remains constantly in awe and envy of his daughter's kindness and emotional transparency.

For her part, Dara oscillates between "idyllic daydreams and precautionary disasters" and a metaphorical headache that is suddenly piercingly literal. When her office becomes a winter of discontent, it is not surprising that she ends up feeling taken for granted, miserable and betrayed on both the work and home fronts. Finally there's Abigail, who given her history has always been a complicated mixture of stinginess and generosity and even as she stares at the muddy water of the Thames, she's plagued by the fact that she always seemed to keep her best friend at a distance.

This novel is all about the nature of love, sex, family and friendships, and the needs of men and women, the roles of partners, the unforeseen and devastating betrayals that can shake us up at various times in our lives, and how our parents can often influence and damage the surfaces of our lives. There are some painful revelations here, but also some delicately nuanced observations as both Dara and Abigail - and Sean and Cameron - are forced to reconcile with their own version of Eden from which they have been abruptly and irrevocably expelled. Mike Leonard 2008.

I loved this book. That is, until I fell off a cliff about one quarter of the way in.
It read marvelously, with none of the sticking points that authors use to make you wonder, or keep you kind of artificially thrilled to keep you going. It flowed on in a really marvelous way.
Then suddenly, it stopped. I was reading an entirely different story. I checked the book jacket, was this a collection of short stories? No, evidently not. I started thumbing through the pages, trying to find names from the 1st section. And I did. Oh, so it's switched point of views, I get it.
But it was so abrupt, I just couldn't go on. I went to the 3rd section, and started reading that, just to keep what I loved from the 1st one, but it didn't work very well.
I'm supposed to finish this book for a book club, but... I don't know, there are so many books out there!

Margot Livesey's "The House on Fortune Street" came out in 2008. The LA Times gave it a favorable review. I felt the book had strong narrators and an intriguing overlap of stories. I enjoyed the literary allusions.

I was somewhat put off by the unnnecessary explanation of the allusions, the attempt to make Cameron a sympathetic character, and some of Dara's histrionics.

The story of Abigail Thomas, her friend, Dara, and their convoluted family histories / love lives does hold the reader's interest. Nevertheless, this is NOT one of those books tht when turning the last page the reader wants to re-read the book or sigh in sorrow to say goodbye to the characters. I was ready to move on to something with more heart.