The Favourite

As her own marriage falls apart, Rosalind, a witty and passionate woman, reminisces about the complex patterns of her life, in which she has played the roles of child, lover, wife, and mother. 15,000 first printing.

Late in this epiphanic novel, narrator Rosalind, a poet, says of her cartoonist husband, Frank, "He had the same attitude to drawing as I had to writing: that the personal, dwelt upon with enough fanaticism, will automatically give rise to the general." This comment, delivered with caginess and wit, reveals why Rosa's warning bells should go off when a new woman character appears in Frank's comic strip, ordinarily based on his family life. Daneman's ( A Chance to Sit Down ) insightful account of Rosa's girlhood infatuation with her father strikes a familiarly Freudian chord. As a child in Australia, Rosa believes that she's her philandering father's "favourite"; although she meets his mistresses and bears sympathetic witness to her mother's sorrow, she considers herself alone to be her mother's true rival. Interspersed chapters detail Rosa's married life in London; there, when Frank has an affair, Rosa gains a fresh perspective on adultery as she considers passion and duplicity both through the adolescent eyes of her shocked daughters and the embarrassing wisdom of her own adult hindsight. Along with its meditations on mistrust and, in the case of Rosa's father, on major depression, this story displays great emotional range. In one cathartic passage, Rosa realizes that Frank's fling with a TV anchorwoman is over when he falls asleep during her broadcast. Daneman's writing has enough liveliness and depth to buoy her splendid story and to raise interest in her earlier work.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

In her third book, British novelist Daneman (A Chance to Sit Down, 1972) plays erotic geometry with the oedipal triangle--but it all seems flat as a plane in the end. Rosalind's husband, Frank, is leaving her for another woman. Fair enough, it seems, since she stole him from his first wife. But these overlapping love triangles seem merely an echo of the primal one: mother-father-daughter. Rosalind was always her father's favorite; she was the bait her mother used to keep her father at home. Daddy looms large in Rosalind's memories, a forceful man and a philanderer who was always running away from home or courting death, only to return in the end. But it is her mother who is the focus of Rosalind's love: ``For me her face is the original, the one on which my idea of faces is based.'' It's hard to understand, since we learn little of her mother other than that she loves to shop for hats and is so distracted that she sometimes gives Rosalind sandwiches with only tomato for filling. (And is it any surprise that little Ros prefers her sandwiches cut into triangles rather than squares?) As Rosalind's narrative jumps back and forth between her childhood in Australia and her present life in England, she also relates her own first experience of sexual desire as a teenager pursued by an older man; her steamy affair with Frank; and the delight she takes in her two young daughters. Frank will return in the end, but Rosalind suffers a far worse betrayal and learns that the family myth of the favorite daughter masks a deeper truth. Daneman can be witty enough with male/female relationships and is perspicacious in portraying children. But readers who know their Freud will be less shocked than Rosalind by the final revelation and will not share her opinion that ``[her] own banal story seems...so much more compelling'' than any other. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From her Sydney childhood to her London middle years, Rosalind is a woman who has always played a starring role in the lives of the men around her. This slice-of-life novel takes us back and forth in time between the events in Rosalind's past that lead up to her father's abandonment of the family and the not-too-distant past in which she discovers and learns to deal with her husband's infidelity. Throughout, whether describing the sudden, mysterious rapture that overwhelms a new mother seeing her baby for the first time or the devastation felt by a wife learning of her husband's faithlessness, Daneman perfectly captures the moment. We gradually come to see, along with the narrator, that being the "favourite" of a parent, a lover, or a child imposes a burden that is almost too costly to bear. Beautifully written and highly recommended.
- Barbara Love, St. Lawrence Coll., Kingston, Ontario
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Rosalind's different roles--daughter, mother, wife--jostle for primacy in this pastiche of periods from her life. Her creator, Daneman, disdains such tools as dialogue or description in favor of a minimalist prose narrative, the one constant in the constant switches of place and time. Its unconventional style, however, homes in on a theme of wide appeal: growing up, with the corollary of a woman claiming an identity amid the series of menfolk in her life, from father to lover to husband. Rosalind copes by having no truck with personal pride; in most instances of stress, as when husband Frank leaves her, she either retreats into a memory of her suicidally prone father or intently observes the present activities of her daughters. With no plot as such, this offbeat paean to pensiveness aims squarely, to be blunt, at offbeat, pensive women over age 45. Gilbert Taylor