The House on Fortune Street
Categories: Staff Picks , Fiction
Some books just make me grateful that I learned to read. Being able to sit down, open a book, and be astonished by the master craftsmanship and the unimaginable imagination of a writer is such a glorious pleasure. Ian McEwan’s Atonement made me think about that not too long ago. (I finally read it, and if you’ve only seen the movie, you need to read it, too.) Now Margot Livesey’s The House on Fortune Street has made me grateful again.
This is a novel told from four viewpoints. Sean is living with Abigail, for whom he left his wife. Their relationship isn’t happy: Abigail may be cheating on him, and she is certainly leaving him far behind as he drudges through his dissertation while she’s off running her theatre company. Their downstairs neighbor, Dara, extends Sean some sympathy. But then Dara commits suicide.
Dara’s father, Cameron, narrates the next section of the novel. It doesn’t pick up from Sean’s story but begins far back in his own childhood, when he realizes how different he is from everyone else. The shocking secret he learns about himself will eventually cause the breakup of his marriage during Dara’s childhood.
Then comes Dara’s story—Dara, who doesn’t know as the reader does why her father left her, and whose dead body the reader has, so to speak, already seen. The narrative of this kind, emotionally needy woman is painful to read: her bewildered relationship with her father, her too trusting affair with a married lover, the petty snarl of relationships at her office, her close but cutting friendship with Abigail.
The final section of the narrative is Abigail’s. Abigail has been Dara’s friend since university days. Raised by parents so feckless that she had to move out on her own at fourteen to finish school, Abigail is eternally grateful to Dara for rescuing her, taking her home on holidays, and showing her what normal life is like. But Dara’s sticky emotionality is alien to Abigail, who is casually promiscuous. Even after she falls in love with Sean and determinedly takes him away from his wife, she can hardly bear to be close to him, and she is impatient with Dara’s grand passions.
Each of these deeply flawed characters is rendered with sympathy and convincing emotion. And therefore their tragic failure ever quite to understand each other is absolutely convincing, too—each one is locked inside a separate “true” story and is uncomprehending of the other three truths.
But of course the triumph of sympathetic imagination that created all of them makes this one beautiful work of art.
