The House on Fortune Street: A Novel
by Margot Livesey
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Book Reviews of The House on Fortune Street: A Novel
Book Review: Best Friends
Summary: 5 Stars
Reviewed by LuAnn Morgan for RebeccasReads (7/08)
Abigail Taylor and Dara MacLeod grew up in different worlds, yet they both felt they missed out on a so-called "normal" childhood, which left them with a sense of something lacking in their lives.
For Dara, the fact that her father left the family when she was a young child created a hunger within her that could only be sated with relationships between herself and older men. She meets Edward, who literally falls at her feet when he trips near where she is sitting. They begin a love that is all-consuming, even though Edward refuses to make a total commitment. Eventually, it comes to light that he is already living with another woman, with whom he has a child. Dara is a counselor by trade. However, she is in desperate need of help herself. Suffering from a continuous depression, she rides the waves of desolation until she can no longer deal with life in general. Abigail's boyfriend finds her after she takes an overdose of sleeping pills.
Abigail grew up with her grandparents after her parents both died within a short time of each other. It hardened her, in a way, and created a wall that refused to let anyone come too close. Each budding relationship ended as she put up barriers to protect herself from the consequences of losing yet another person she cared about.
The two women meet in college and become fast friends. After all, they empathize with one another. They clearly see each other's weaknesses - typically, the same ones they have themselves. The friendship is based on love, mutual trust and understanding. Eventually, Dara rents the apartment built into Abigail's home and it slowly begins to drive a wedge between them. Their faults begin to become more apparent without distance. Also, because they now live so close together, they find less reason to call on each other just to visit. The result is a distancing of their relationship.
"The House on Fortune Street" is written in an interesting perspective. It begins with Abigail's boyfriend Sean as he discusses their own relationship, including its strengths and downfalls. He also talks about his concerns regarding Dara, knowing she is dealing with serious issues that threaten her self-esteem and that do, indeed, cause her to take her own life. It is Sean's story that gives the basis of the novel and introduces us to the characters. His story ends with the discovery of Dara's body.
The next part of the book revolves around Dara's family and is written in her father's voice. He explains why he left his family, a truth he was never able to reveal to Dara. We learn of his own childhood and what separated he and Dara's mother. His story ends with a discussion between him and his closest friend about Dara's death.
The reader then gets the chance to hear Dara's story. The child who had so much potential becomes the adult who is limited by her own mental illness. We learn about her feelings for Abigail and for her father. We also learn why she felt it necessary to take her own life in the end. Naturally, the book progresses into the story of Abigail and we are finally taken through her life and learn why she feels threatened by every relationship she encounters. She also tells us more about Dara.
Following Dara's death, Abigail meets with Dara's father and he finally opens up to her and tells her the things he should have revealed to Dara herself. The openness leaves Abigail wondering how Dara's life could have been different had she known the truth all along. Would it have been better or worse?
I became so absorbed in this novel that I felt like nothing else got done until I finished reading it. What a wonderfully written story! Margot Livesey is truly a literary artist.
"The House on Fortune Street" received advance praise from such well-known and award-winning writers as Geraldine Brooks and Ann Patchett. Rarely does a book come along that can garner the type of reviews this one has and I am pleased to have had the opportunity to add my own to the list.
This is a truly wonderful book and should be on everyone's list of books to read. It's not often that I read a novel that I don't want to end. "The House on Fortune Street" is such a book.
Book Review: Left Wanting
Summary: 3 Stars
Although it certainly doesn't occur in every story or every book - it seems to be very common that the end of a work of fiction ties back in some way to the beginning. In "The House on Fortune Street", although I am sure it is probably my fault, the only link between the end and beginning of this book is that both contain a letter. One is a mundane letter from a back, the other a letter whose contents have been eagerly anticipated throughout the book. And yet - I was left flat. I enjoyed the book, on the whole, but I don't feel as if either the big reveal nor the journey the reader takes to get there lived up to expectations.
The four main characters of the novel - Sean, Dara, Abigail and Cameron are each given their own section of the book. In each, we look through their eyes at many of the events that tie them all together. I did feel as if I gained some insight as to why they did what they did, but there was still a barrier that left the question of why they were who they were unanswered.
(I did find it interesting though, that the one character whose head I most did not want to be in was the one character whose section is written in the first person. His thoughts, the images we see while inhabiting his mind, continue to bother me, days after finishing the book.)
And yet, that tantalizing bit that remains out of reach is hinted at in many ways throughout the book. Maybe, now that I think about it, that's one of the main themes of the story.
"She was looking at him across the table, her eyes deep and steady, and he knew that if he stretched out his hand she would lead him to her bedroom. He sat there, meeting her gaze, imagining the skin he could see leading to the skin he couldn't, imagining the pleasure of sex without history. At last, not sure if he was being courageous or cowardly, he looked away."
Each character is tied to a book or a writer, a plot device that I kept forgetting about unless it was being thrust in front of my face. The subtlety was lost on me.
"Dickens has been two years older that she was when he had published his first sketch, and described his eyes so dimmed with joy and pride, that they could not bear the street, and were not fit to be seen there. Her own eyesight was as keen as ever - she could distinguish the start ruin of the cathedral and beyond it the headland - but she understood about hiding joy."
I still feel ambivalent about this book, and I've been considering my review for a few days. I enjoyed reading the book, there were parts that I felt were very well done and I felt as if I learned something about the characters.
And yet - and yet. I guess I never really felt as if the book lived up to its potential. I felt as if there was some big question that had been posed about these four people that was never answered. Four lives, tied together. Each character impacting and forever changing each others lives...
"But no, what she was sensing was absence, not a presence. Everything she could see, everything she could measure, was the same, and yet everything was profoundly altered."
Book Review: "Suffering is what gives us souls."
Summary: 5 Stars
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.
Book Review: Beautiful, absorbing, truly impossible-to-put-down novel
Summary: 5 Stars
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.
Book Review: Love and Luck
Summary: 5 Stars
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.