- Paperback: 416 pages
- Publisher: Saqi Books (April 1 2008)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0863563805
- ISBN-13: 978-0863563805
- Product Dimensions: 20.9 x 13.6 x 2.3 cm
- Shipping Weight: 612 g
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #1,835,743 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Amazon
Conforming to Philip Larkin's famously acidic sentiments about parenting, Maggie Gee's The White Family offers a bleak, but piercingly honest, portrait of an "ordinary" British family. The novel's patriarch, Alfred White, is a curmudgeonly London park keeper who has presided over both the park and his home-life for 40 years. A fan of "the good old days", his misty-eyed sentimentality is augmented with a racism of the unthinking kind. When he's struck down with a stroke his family are forced to come to terms with a life without him. For his gentle, bookish if submissive wife, May, loneliness is the greatest fear. However, Alfred's brand of fathering has left more painful legacies for their three children. Firstborn Darren, the golden child and now a successful journalist in America, still bitterly resents his father's beatings. Daughter Shirley, whose relationships with black men led to violent conflicts with Alfred, is more forgiving but no less damaged. The youngest child Dirk has absorbed his father's worst opinions and become a shaven-headed, misogynistic fascist.
Like Graham Swift's Last Orders, Gee makes judicious use of a multi-voiced narrative. This inventive structure provides a disturbingly intimate understanding of the emotions and prejudices of the Whites, while contributions from subsidiary figures such as Darren's childhood friend, the failed novelist Thomas Lovell, help to extend the vista beyond the immediate family. With the possible exception of Dirk, whose suppressed homosexuality is overblown, her characters are richly drawn; imbued with truly human strengths and failings. Dirk's venomous racist rants, which later spill into violence, are deeply shocking, but Gee's real achievement is to examine the more subtle and insidious forms of racism (and of homophobia) in British society today. --Travis Elborough
From Publishers Weekly
The gritty intimacies of everyday middle-class life in England flesh out a larger story of race and resentment in Maggie Gee's The White Family, shortlisted for Britain's Orange Prize. Alfred White has been park keeper at Albion Park for nearly 50 years when he collapses and is taken to the hospital. As his family gathers around him, their individual histories are revealed: son Darren is a very successful and rather superficial journalist; daughter Shirley, to her father's disgust, lives with a black man; son Dirk is a budding skinhead. Their mother, May, tries desperately to hold the family together, despite the odds. A violent attack shows how strong racial hatred can be, but also serves as an emotional release for some of the novel's tormented characters. Gee's graceful, nuanced family portrait is well framed by her take on racial tensions in late 20th-century England.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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5.0 out of 5 stars (1 customer review)
5.0 out of 5 stars
The father hath eaten sour grapes and the children's teeth are set on edge, Dec 12 2010
By Ralph Blumenau - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: The White Family (Paperback)
Alfred White is seriously ill in hospital. His family - wife and three children - come to visit, and the various chapters relate how they really feel about him. May, his wife, loves him, in part for his sense of duty, and despite his choleric and imperious temper and his crude race prejudice. Shirley, his daughter, had escaped his control at the age of nineteen after he had committed an act of violence against her. She had been driven, first, into a disastrous one-night stand; but later she had been able to make a happy marriage with a Ghanian. He had died and she was now living with a Jamaican partner. Nothing could have enraged her father more. The two sons have inherited their father's explosive temper: Darren is a successful international journalist, but is on his third bad marriage; and Dirk is a foul-mouthed failure and is as racist as his father. The sons have never dared to stand up to him.Alfred and May are rather lost in the modern world and, in their different ways, nostalgically look back to an older England which, in their memories at least, was more personal, more cohesive and less challenging.
While May is nearly pure goodness (her only failing a lack of courage) and Shirley is a genuine counter-point to all that racism, the men are all pretty unlikeable figures; but they are all damaged and vulnerable, and one comes to feel sorry for them all. Alfred and the children often seem consumed by hatred; but there are also moments when we see that Alfred is capable of love, and his children's attitude towards their father is also quite ambivalent; so the scenes around Alfred's hospital bed are taut with emotions. Two of the children do some very dramatic things on their way back from the hospital. The novel started rather slowly, but it steadily gathers pace, power and pathos.
Maggie Gee is a terrific writer!
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