The House on Fortune Street: A Novel (Hardcover)

by Margot Livesey (Author)
Key Phrases: euthanasia book, City Hall, Great Expectations, Charles Dodgson (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
The absorbing latest from Livesey (Homework) opens multiple perspectives on the life of Dara MacLeod, a young London therapist, partly by paying subtle homage to literary figures and works. The first of four sections follows Keats scholar Sean Wyman: his girlfriend, Abigail, is Dara's best friend, and the couple lives upstairs from Dara in the titular London house. While Dara tries to coax her boyfriend Edward to move out of the house he shares with his ex-girlfriend and daughter, Sean receives a mysterious letter implying that Abigail is having an affair, and both relationships start to fall apart. The second section, set during Dara's childhood, is narrated by Dara's father, who has a strange fascination with Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll) and shares Dodgson's creepy interest in young girls. Dara's meeting with Edward dominates part three, which mirrors the plot of Jane Eyre, and the final part, reminiscent of Great Expectations, is told mainly from Abigail's college-era point of view. The pieces cross-reference and fit together seamlessly, with Dara's fate being revealed by the end of part one and explained in the denouement. Livesey's use of the classics enriches the narrative, giving Dara a larger-than-life resonance. (May)
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From The Washington Post

Reviewed by Donna Rifkind

None of the houses in Margot Livesey's newest novel is safe or sound enough to meet the needs of its inhabitants, including the house on Fortune Street in the Brixton area of London that lends the book its title. The most durable structure here, in fact, is not a house but the novel itself, whose design unites so seamlessly with its intentions that one wants to admire it from every angle.

Livesey encourages readers to do just that by dividing the book into four sections, each with a distinct point of view. First is Sean, a Keats scholar in his early 30s; followed by Cameron, a middle-aged amateur photographer; Dara, Cameron's daughter, who works as a therapist in a women's center; and Abigail, an actress, who is Sean's girlfriend as well as Dara's best friend from college.

Although these four sections include overlapping plot points and details, their purpose is not to provide a "Rashomon"-like retelling of the same events from different perspectives. Instead, through the divided narrative Livesey intends to show us how separate these characters are -- how little, despite their proximity, they actually share -- for this is a novel that is above all about loneliness.

Sean, for instance, lives on the top floors of the Fortune Street house with Abigail, who bought the building with money she inherited from an aunt. On the surface, he and Abigail look like a genuinely happy pair: Sean recently left his wife for Abigail, who had vigorously pursued him, and for a brief time their new romance was mutually thrilling. But lately Sean has been restive and self-doubting, unable to make much progress on his dissertation. And Abigail, who has begun to insist that Sean contribute to the household's upkeep by paying rent, is rarely at home, working late hours and traveling to drum up support for her budding theater company.

In the meantime, Dara, who lives alone on the bottom floor of Abigail's house, is struggling to improve her own domestic arrangements. Though she yearns for a husband and children, she's emotionally entangled with a violinist who can't offer her more than vague promises. She spends her workdays self-confidently dispensing advice to other women about their rocky relationships, but spends too many evenings disconsolately alone.

If the future for these characters is uncertain, their pasts are even more bewildering. Dara and Abigail became best friends when they met at university (St. Andrews in Scotland), after they realized that each "had had a version of Eden from which she had been expelled, abruptly and irrevocably, at the age of ten." For Abigail, the paradise of her childhood ended with the deaths of her much-loved grandparents, leaving her at the mercy of her unreliable mother and father. Dara's sense of safety vanished at the same age, when a disastrous family camping trip exposed secrets that led the way to her parents' divorce.

Dara never finds out exactly why her father left, but the reader does, thanks to the section devoted entirely to her father's point of view. In fact, we learn several illuminating secrets about Cameron, who was raised in rural Scotland in the 1950s, an era when children were encouraged to soldier on silently during difficult times. Much of Cameron's section is devoted to his lifelong efforts to understand the impulses and emotions he was taught to bury. And although he does finally achieve a measure of self-knowledge, he's unable to share most of it with Dara, who mistakenly believes he abandoned her because he didn't love her enough.

Small wonder that these lives, built unsteadily atop traumatic childhood events, have little forward momentum. Yet the narrative never seems mired in the same ways as its characters: It keeps turning and turning, like an architectural model on a revolving pedestal, revealing something new with every spin.

And for all its melancholy, the novel leaves readers with a surprising hopefulness. Some of this arises from the pleasures of its style: Livesey has chosen every detail here with precision, from toast crumbs to paint colors, to evoke the shimmering illusion of these characters' home-based lives. For all her care, the construction feels effortless. Even the stark divisions of the book into quarters seem inevitable rather than jarring.

But the book's hopefulness has an even deeper source: the continuity of the English literary tradition. All the characters have sincere attachments to canonical British authors, going so far as to travel to their houses to observe how they lived. Sean has his beloved Keats, of course, while Dara often compares herself with Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre. Cameron becomes absorbed with the life of Charles Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, the creator of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Abigail's grandfather, who emigrated from Germany, learned how to be English by reading the works of Charles Dickens, and Abigail has inherited his devotion to the author, falling in love with the house on Fortune Street for its Dickensian-sounding name.

Again, Livesey's skill keeps these relationships perfectly organic and never forced. By situating her novel firmly within the house of literature, she honors its history while adding on some elegantly appointed rooms of her own.

Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Harper (May 6, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0061451525
• ISBN-13: 978-0061451522
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.2 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (29 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #187,494 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Love and Luck, May 9, 2008

By	Rebecca Holsen (Maryland, USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful, absorbing, truly impossible-to-put-down novel, May 9, 2008

By	Hope Edwards (New York, NY) - See all my reviews

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.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Livesey at top of her game, May 26, 2008

By	Al Terego - See all my reviews

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.