The French writer Montherlant said that ‘happiness writes white’ – that is, it doesn't show up on the page; novels must be about bad things, angst, malaise. Martin Amis agrees: 'Only Tolstoy, perhaps, has made happiness swing.' Not so: step forward, Elinor Lipman.
This wonderful American author has never achieved marquee-top status here in the UK, but she’s built up a dedicated fan base that includes writers like Wendy Holden, Fay Weldon, Nigella Lawson, Carol Shields and Maggie O’Farrell. Her books are beautifully observed, wry and original social comedies. The Family Man is her latest novel, and I think it's one of her best.
Henry is a recently retired New York lawyer, successful, upstanding and lonely. He’s gay, but he’s also the straight man, literally, to his long-since ex-wife, the appalling and hilariously self-centred Denise. When Denise’s husband dies, she reclaims Henry (‘a gay ex is something of a status symbol’) and attempts to guilt him into becoming her unpaid legal consultant and the sounding board for her griefs, not over her husband’s demise but over his will. Meanwhile Henry is building a more rewarding relationship with his ex-stepdaughter Thalia, a struggling actress.
In this totally delightful book, Lipman explores the kind of relationships that most fiction overlooks. It is a joy to see Henry belatedly experience parenthood with Thalia, and to see her benefit from having a real father figure around. As a responsible textbook lawyer, Henry is both thrilled and appalled at the dramas caused by Thalia and her mother, whether it’s Thalia’s ‘fauxmance’ - publicity-stunt romance - with a horror film actor/director or Denise painting her apartment walls black to stop her stepsons selling it. But shrewd Lipman knows, and shows, that people’s bad points are also their good points: Denise’s crass match-making (described as ‘This one’s gay, and so’s that one’) means that Henry ends up in love with Todd, who works at Gracious Places selling table settings. Todd is fascinated by Thalia’s fauxmance; Henry charms Todd’s mother, and in a chain of strange events precipitated by the unfortunate Glenn Crouch’s death, previously lonely people are forging connections and having fun.
How does Lipman do this without becoming mawkish? It’s in the characterisation and in the beautiful, balanced, feather-light prose. Henry, meeting Todd’s mother Lillian, notices her slippers: ‘elf wear, toes crescenting upwards, embroidered with forget-me-nots. “Toddy! Bring a tray table,” she yells.’ Even a character who doesn’t appear – Thalia’s father – is captured to a T: Henry sees in her features traces of ‘his predecessor, the doomed biological father who fell off a mountain in Peru, who had been tall, long-legged, known to successive husbands as a photograph in the nursery: hands on his hips and a tolerant grin that seemed to say, Okay, I’m posing. Take your photo and let me get on with my adventures.’
Thalia’s fake publicity-stunt romance with the horror film star and director Leif (previously Larry) Dumont is inspired. Lots of it takes place off-stage, nonchalantly reported by Thalia to Henry over coffee the morning after or over dinner and drinks to Henry and Todd, but when Leif does appear he gives great value:
Leif is looking more and more to Henry like an undesirable upstairs neighbor. His forehead is high and bony, and he doesn’t appear to blink.
‘Leif now produces and stars in horror films,’ explains Thalia.
Henry raises his glass. ‘What fun,’ he says.
‘They’re not fun,’ says Leif. ‘They’re terrifying – which I say proudly.’
The denouement to the subplot about Thalia’s love life as charming as it is unexpected, and Lipman manages to show us exactly what Thalia’s final choice of suitor is like, and what he means to her, in the way he turns around: ‘a pivot and a smile – not a military about-face but a showman’s spin – and without question it makes Thalia laugh.’
So, read Elinor Lipman – you could start with The Family Man, or for more on families, Then She Found Me, or for more of a romance The Way Men Act. Without question she will make you laugh, and she’ll also make you happy. You might also want to read this thumbs-up from the Telegraph . though I re-read the last sentence a few times, thinking: has the word 'sophisticated' been mis-placed, or was it even meant to be there at all? The sentence would have a new meaning, and one I would agree with more, without it ...
