The Facts of Life: A Novel (Paperback)

by Graham Joyce (Author) "If she's not here, thinks Cassie, if she's not coming..." (more)
Key Phrases: draft curtain, peace bell, spiritualist church, The Facts of Life, Raggie Annie, Lady Godiva (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Warm with nostalgia and flecked with the subtle fantasy that seasons nearly all his fiction, Joyce's latest novel (after Smoking Poppy) is an uneven mix of the charming and the self-consciously peculiar. The setting is Coventry, England, in the years after WWII, where the surviving Vine family-mother Martha, her seven grown daughters and their various offspring-are all trying to build lives out of the ruins left by Nazi bombs. The bittersweet events center on young Frank, the illegitimate son of psychologically unstable youngest daughter Cassie, who like his mum has inherited a fey streak that makes him receptive to precognition and restless spirits. As Frank and Cassie bounce from household to household, cared for by different family members, their peregrinations evoke in miniature the British postwar experience, mirrored in the lives of Cassie's siblings: one is married to a man who relives the war through his affair with a dead soldier's wife; another is a politically liberal participant in a comically self-destructing socialist commune. Virtually plotless, the book unfolds as a series of vignettes, interrelated loosely through shared, affectionately realized characters and seriocomic treatments of death and (especially) sexuality. Frank's supernatural experiences, which include frequent sessions with a mysterious figure he refers to cryptically as "The-Man-Behind-The-Glass," are hints that he shares hi relatives' powers. Indeed, the subtlety with which Joyce presents clairvoyant episodes makes them entirely credible in a novel that celebrates the strong bond of family and the deep well of sensitivity on which they all draw. In the end, this is a haunting story about flawed but good-hearted people who bear the hallmarks of eccentricity but also the beneficent aura of human connectedness.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist
In this moving novel, Joyce traces the boyhood of Frank Vine, born into a loving and ramshackle family in the English countryside during World War II. The product of a brief liaison between an American GI and a local woman, Frank is marked with an extrasensory gift that he shares with his matriarchal grandmother and his emotionally unstable mother. Shortly after his birth, Frank's mother is deemed unfit to care for him, so his grandmother makes the executive decision that his care will be divided among his six aunts, each highly unconventional in her own right. During the next 10 years, Frank makes his home at a farm, a commune, and a makeshift mortuary, slowly finding his place in his eccentric but loving family. Joyce's emotional tale skirts sentimentality by presenting the family warts and all: each of the sisters is a complex and contradictory figure, and Joyce fully examines the consequences of the small feuds and squabbles that characterize a close-knit family. A beautifully written tale that entwines domestic drama with magic realism. Brendan Dowling
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Washington Square Press (June 1, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743463439
• ISBN-13: 978-0743463430
• Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 5.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #201,526 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Graceful Characters and Precise Language. A Treasure!, October 10, 2003

By	Shikhar Dixit (East Brunswick, New Jersey United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Facts of Life : A Novel (Hardcover)

A psychic matriarch, seven daughters and one magical boy hold center stage in Graham Joyce's latest novel, The Facts of Life, a work situated comfortably somewhere between the best mainstream fiction and the subtlest works of fantasy. Be it magical realism or literary horror, the key ingredients here, as with all of Joyce's works, are characters you can reach out and touch. And they touch you right back.
Set in during and post-WWII Coventry, England, the novel opens with "wayward ... fey" Cassie Vine and the bundle in her arms, Frank, whom she fails to give away to a prospective foster mother. Returning home to her mother, Martha and her six sisters, Cassie triggers a discussion that will set the tone and struggle for the rest of the novel. As Cassie herself "is the last girl on Earth fit to raise a child," Martha and her daughters agree that Frank should be raised by the entire clan.
Passed from Martha and Aunt Beatie Vine's own care to Aunt Una and Uncle Tom's farm, to his twin aunts Evelyn and Ina, it becomes clear that Frank is special and possessed of special abilities. Here at the farm, young Frank discovers the Man-Behind-The-Glass, a mysterious figure trapped in the Earth, constantly demanding that Frank bring him things.
Meanwhile, the secret of Frank's conception remains with Cassie, buried deep in the night that German bombers circled over Coventry dropping incendiary and explosive payloads until most of the city was leveled. Cassie, who is regularly possessed of "blue" periods during which she tends to wander far, must often leave Frank in the care of his more stable relatives, transferring him from household-to-household, including an experimental commune and a house with an active mortuary parlor in the back. From each he takes away a lesson about life.
Through it all, Martha watches, patiently directing Franks care from place-to-place, occasionally visited at the front door by precognitive apparitions that help her pave the way.
Though a quiet work, The Facts of Life is no less gripping than Joyce's more conventional work in novels like Requiem and The Tooth Fairy. It's gently graceful characters and precise language makes this alternately horrific and humorous work a treasure whose pages will have slipped through the reader's fingers far too quickly.

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Joyce's best, July 12, 2004

By A Customer

Graham Joyce just keeps getting better. This novel is beautifully written, flawlessly plotted, with very well drawn characters. It is quite funny in places, and it vividly evokes the bombing of Coventry and its aftermath. The elements of fantasy are woven seemlessly together with the more "realistic" elements. You really come to care about this family. In his earlier novels, Joyce's endings are sometimes disappointing, but that is not the case here - the ending is perfect.

Joyce's supernatural thrillers with exotic settings(such as Smoking Poppy, Indigo and Requiem)are among the best of their kind, but he is even better at coming of age stories set in working class Britain, such as The Tooth Fairy and this book. The Facts of Life reminded me more of magic realists Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Isabelle Allende than it did of "genre" fantasy or horror.

I can't think of any contemporary novelists whose work I enjoy more than Joyce. I can't wait for the next one.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars my first review ever, August 25, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: The Facts of Life : A Novel (Hardcover)

Joyce (Graham Joyce) is one of my favorite authors. I started with The Dark Sister, then I inhaled The Tooth Fairy, and quickly read everything else. The Facts of Life was highly anticipated, and now I know why.
Joyce has a gift for description and humanity that flows through his pages and into the reader. He doesn't care whether you believe in the extraordinary traits he gives three of the main characters (just as he disregarded the people who say the tooth fairy doesn't exist), he presents it in a way that makes it not only real but almost mundane. He takes Life, and imbues it with unforgettable reality.

The Facts of Life left me breathless.