Our Father - Softcover

Marilyn French

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0241001609 ISBN 13: 9780241001608

Publisher: Hamish Hamilton, 1994

Synopsis

"FRENCH'S MOST FOCUSED, DARING, AND POWERFUL NOVEL."
--New Woman
Famed presidential advisor Stephen Upton has suffered a stroke, and his four very different daughters gather in his perfectly appointed mansion outside Boston to await his death or recovery. Elizabeth, cold and calculating, fights hard for every success and pays a high price; beautiful Mary has always needed a man to support her tastes, but time is catching up with her; Alex can't remember her childhood and wants to know why; and Ronnie, illegitimate and proud, refuses to acknowledge her feelings for the man they all love and hate. In the weeks to come, they will learn one another's terrible secrets, and the astonishing truth about the life they might have shared....
Once again, Marilyn French has written an extraordinary novel of our times--a novel of family love and resentment, of sisterhood and fatherhood, of acceptance and rejection and the search for peace.
"SHOULD STRIKE A CHORD WITH EVERY WOMAN who is willing to think honestly about the place of femaleness in the world."
--Chicago Tribune

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews

More quasi-feminist Sturm und Drang from a certified mistress of the genre (Her Mother's Daughter, 1987, etc.), this featuring four grown half-sisters reunited to care for the elderly father who cheerfully abused but failed to love them. Take one Frigid Intellectual (Elizabeth, a 50-something assistant secretary of the treasury); one Dizzy Socialite (Mary, a simpering, middle-aged divorc‚e); one Middle-Class Housewife (Alex, an empty-nester who longs to commune with God); and one Young Woman of Color (Ronnie, grad student and illegitimate daughter of her father's maid), mix them together, and you have one Total Woman for the 90's. French, however, seeks drama in keeping her stereotypes separate but closeted together and letting them bicker for several hundred pages. The four females, having been raised separately by different mothers, meet at the mansion of their elderly father- -Quintessential White Guy Stephen Upton, a mover and shaker in Republican circles and an entertainer of presidents and kings--to decide on his future care in the wake of a debilitating stroke. While Upton languishes in the hospital, the half-sisters occupy his mansion outside Boston, fencing warily with one another at first, then tentatively comparing notes and learning, to their own amazement, if not the reader's, that they were each in turn raped, terrorized, and otherwise tormented by their supposedly refined father. As Upton returns for in-home care, these silly sisters, who've moved from entertaining spiteful thoughts of one another (``She's good looking but getting fat,'' ``Ditzy little housewife,'' etc.) to bursting into frequent tears and embracing on a moment's notice, decide to put their monster-father through a secret trial. The expression of their long-suppressed rage will make them rich beyond all expectation--and the ultimate survivors. A book that begins with ``Women can hurt you just as much as men!'' and ends with ``My father's mansion, my prison. Go, Ronnie'' has little to offer in the way of fresh ideas. A musty, messy fairy tale with plenty of passion but no style. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

It's no surprise that French's last book, The War against Women , set the course for her new novel, but its horrific subject matter, men's violent abuse of women, has not translated effectively into fiction. French, manages, instead, to reduce the provocative themes of child molestation, rape, and incest to the contrivances of a propagandistic melodrama. Using a King Lear format, French has created an evil patriarch named Stephen Upton. Wealthy, influential, and elderly, Upton has just suffered a debilitating stroke that has left him paralyzed and speechless. His grown daughters all rush to his bedside, but their mission is not one of mercy. Each was born to a different mother, and each has a major complex about their cruel and manipulative father. The eldest, Elizabeth, is an ambitious but lonely economist. Voluptuous Mary has had plenty of husbands and loads of money, but is now out of both and frightened. Alex should be happy with her cozy, housewifey life, but she's experiencing a spiritual crisis. And then there's Ronnie, Upton's illegitimate, lesbian, ecologist daughter, whose existence is a complete shock to her half-sisters. Her mother was Upton's self-effacing Chicano housekeeper. The four women slowly overcome their mutual hostility and begin to confide in each other, and what do they discover? That they had each been raped by their father during their childhoods. No doubt French intended to raise some serious issues here, but her blatantly emblematic characters and pedestrian prose arouse little more than tabloid-grade fascination. Her reputation, heretofore well-deserved, precedes her, so demand will be high. Donna Seaman

About this edition

• Publisher: Hamish Hamilton
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0241001609
• ISBN 13: 9780241001608
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 464