Our Father by Marilyn French Hamish Hamilton $272 I'VE never read a book so much like a stage play, so much so that it is hard not to wonder why Marilyn French conceived it as a novel in the first place.
The structure is that of a classical drama: three acts, carefully paralleled in themes and length, each ending on a stagy dramatic surprise which bursts out at the reader just as the curtain falls.
It's not just the structure. It's the claustrophobic lack of space too, with all the central action in its 450 pages crammed into the same cheerless house - a set designer's dream.
Even though the book's key events span 50 years, they're almost never recreated for us. Instead they are verbally described by one character to another in dramatic speeches. The subject, too, is artificial, a device dreamt up intellectually to show us something the author wants us to see.
The story is almost mythical; four half-sisters gather together in their wealthy father's home as he lies dying. Their hatred for each other is only surpassed by their hatred for him. As time slowly passes, the women are trapped in their father's vast house, forced to endure each other's company. Gradually they look back over their lives, begin to acknowledge traumatic secrets in the past and learn to understand and eventually love each other.
If that story outline sounds too convenient to be real - well, yes, it is implausible. A problem with the book is that its ideas are always more interesting than the characters themselves. They never managed, for me, to be any more than mouthpieces, there to debate issues of interest to the author.