An Honest Woman

An Honest Woman is an unusual and disturbing novel about the incestuous love between a father and his daughter. Set in Paris and Philadelphia, the story builds upon the childhood of O'Hare Lavin, a dark, brooding Irishman who made his fortune as a builder, and the controlling spirit of his strong and loving, yet undemonstrative mother. O'Hare had dominated his wife, son, and three daughters with a fierce puritanic power that allowed little pleasure in the world. At the opening of the novel, O'Hare has been dead for months, and his daughter Mary, the one person he really loved and who returned that love, emotionally and physically, has fled from America and the memories of her father. She is living in Paris as the mistress of an insensitive, bourgeois Frenchman. When her sisters and sister-in-law arrive in Paris, Mary thinks her family has come to convince her she should return home. However, they are there to persuade her not to accept her rightful inheritance of all of O'Hare's wealth, but rather to share it with them.

The story of the love affair between father and daughter is understood through the gentleness and honesty of Mary's character and the self-recriminations and guilt that plagued O'Hare.

The surrealistic atmosphere is intensified by the turmoil of the general strike in Paris, the haunting memories of the past, with its dark, strange love, and an intervening love affair with a young Greek student that determines Mary's future.

In his fourth novel, Jack Dunphy has created a fascinating world of the Lavin family, and has explored an unusual love and its acceptance by the other members of the family.