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4_S U N D A Y , J U L Y 1 7 , 2 0 0 5 R7L O S A N G E L E S T I M E S B O O K R E V I E W

By Benjamin Kunkel

It’s All Right NowA Novel

Charles Chadwick

HarperCollins: 682 pp., $25.95

CHARLES CHADWICK has just pub-lished his first novel at age 72. He began“It’s All Right Now” in 1974, while servingwith the British Foreign Council in Ni-geria, and over three decades of week-ends, in the course of postings to Brazil,Canada and Poland, he created this

enormous fictional journal of one Tom Ripple, a remark-ably unremarkable English accountant who hardly ven-tures any farther than County Suffolk. The novel’s suc-cess can be measured by the speed with which you forgetthe superficially interesting story behind its publicationand come to believe in the superficially dull story of itsnarrator. A meek, gray being — “I’ve noted before, I think,that the impression I seem to give is one of neutrality. Ifeel pretty neutral about that” — Tom Ripple is never-theless one of the most vivid and robust characters in re-cent British fiction.

Part 1 establishes the pattern of Ripple’s diffident re-lationship with the universe. An absurdly private man, heavoids human contact — which is to say conflict — wher-ever possible. Living in an “unnoteworthy north Londonsuburb where to try to keep to oneself is to draw attentionto oneself,” Ripple sucks up to the boss he can’t stand,mumbles agreement with every pronouncement utteredby his sanctimonious social worker wife and discovers aslittle as he can about the lives of his two children. But theworld will not keep to itself.

The house on one side of Ripple’s belongs to a peder-ast with designs on Ripple’s son, while the house on theother side shelters a stoically miserable elderly couple.The great event in the first part of the novel is a picnic ofthe three households at which Ripple encounters the eld-erly Hambles’ misery up close. When Mrs. Hamble, who isterminally ill, begins to cry at the sight of her husbandsporting innocently with the Ripple children (a part ofthe couple’s grief is to be childless), our hero reacts likethis:

“ ‘Here,’ I said, giving her my handkerchief. ‘Who’dunderstand why you are crying? I mean, you’re all rightnow, aren’t you?’

“I’ve tried since to think up two questions stupiderthan those but haven’t got anywhere near it.”

Ripple’s chief ambition is to believe that he and othersare “all right.” Later, he sees the freshly widowed Mr.Hamble tending his garden and “looking from a distancelike a contented man.” This is the distance from whichRipple likes to view things.

Over the course of the novel, Ripple is left by his wife,briefly acquires a new girlfriend, inhabits a series of mod-est dwellings, follows at a distance the progress of hischildren, comes reluctantly to know several more groupsof neighbors, watches a lot of TV, listens to some classicalmusic and mainly grows old. Meanwhile, there is Eng-land: “tins of corned beef and asparagus tips” in the cup-board and “the same old messy passage of clouds” acrossthe sky. The trick of “It’s All Right Now” is to make thisseem momentous as well as commonplace. Ripple cam-

paigns to comprehend the meaning of an ordinary mid-dle-class life in a prosperous nation. The defeat of his ef-fort speaks to its honesty.

Yet Chadwick has draped Ripple’s sheets of plotlessmusing over a definite repeated shape. In each of thebook’s four parts, Ripple first resists any knowledge ofthose around him, is then lured by his politeness andcomplacency into witnessing his neighbors’ sorrows, andfinally resumes his troubled solitude. His reaction to adinner invitation can stand as typical: “A friendshiploomed, making me feel decidedly unfriendly. I acceptedof course.” If his disposition changes at all, it is throughan unconscious enlargement of his sympathies. Ourgradual recognition of this and other themes (which toRipple go undetected) resembles his account of listeningto Beethoven: “I waited for the infrequent tunes, so muchthick and impenetrable stuff around them, like streamssuddenly emerging down the side of high, wooded moun-tains.”

Chadwick excels at the description of music and faces,and a few of Ripple’s glances at others tell us everythingabout him. In the mother of a schizophrenic girl he sees“the look of someone accustomed to hurt who is trying totalk herself out of it.” In his son, he has observed “the con-tented but incredulous expression of a man in love.” Andthen there is the memory of his dying father’s eyes:

“There was anger within them suddenly and a disciplinedpity for himself and a terrible envy of which he wasashamed.” Ripple’s gaze is so intensely sympathetic thathe often averts it. Or, you might say, his feelings remainso tender because they are so little used.

Ripple comes to seem so real that we doubt there is anauthor behind him. Yet Ripple’s baffled, ingenuous nar-ration should not deceive us as to Chadwick’s cunning. Areader might note how a strolling Ripple first glances upat “lit bedrooms” on Page 7, employs binoculars onPage 331 in the hope of a glimpse of female flesh and then,on Page 477, sees something at last: “It was all so fleeting,the instant before she drew the curtains, that I couldn’tbe sure if she was naked.”

At once modest and epic, “It’s All Right Now” is funny,moving, astute even in its narrator’s confusions, andrather casually magnificent. Sometimes it is also, it mustbe said, very boring. The life of a fictional character tendsto flourish at the expense of plot, while too intricate aplan of events is hostile to a breathing human life. Chad-wick has plainly determined to err on the side of reality.The ultimate effect is of the enormous, inarticulate andfinally private significance of a single life. Or as Ripplesays of Mozart: “He almost seems to be saying somethingbut if we knew what it was there’d be nothing more tosay.” 8

Life through an accountant’s averted eyes

Benjamin Kunkel, an editor at the magazine n+1, is theauthor of the forthcoming novel “Indecision.”

Vivienne Flesher For The Times

R6 S U N D A Y , J U L Y 1 7 , 2 0 0 5L O S A N G E L E S T I M E S B O O K R E V I E W

By Anne Boles Levy

The Year’s Best Science Fictionand Fantasy for TeensEdited by Jane Yolen and Patrick Nielsen Hayden

Tor: 288 pp., $17.95

IF your baby brother’s a devil and you see nothingbut darkness in the adults around you, you’reprobably just imagining things. But then, whatdo grown-ups know?

Not much, at least when it comes to conjuringfantasy and science-fiction stories pitched toteens. It ought to be a natural fit: Teens have an

outsized number of dragons to slay, metaphoricallyspeaking, including dating to underage drinking, anddon’t yet know they’re not invincible. As they hit that pro-verbial awkward age, their imaginations are also bridgingthe gap between the benign fluff of fairy tales and the am-biguities and antiheroes of their parents’ worlds.

These teen terrors ought to be rich veins for enterpris-ing writers to mine, but youthful fans have been “hoppingfrom children’s books right into adult books, withouttraining wheels,” writes Jane Yolen, herself a formidableand prolific writer of books for children and young adults.

But nothing could suck the coolness out of a pastimefaster than sharing it with potbellied Aragorns with plas-tic swords or tricked-out housewives in Klingon masks.Once you’ve outgrown Harry Potter, where’s there to go?

Into this black hole step Yolen and Patrick NielsenHayden, a senior editor at science fiction and fantasypublisher Tor, with a slim but worthy addition to the“Year’s Best” shelf-busters beloved by science fiction,fantasy and horror readers.

With 11 entries, however, “The Year’s Best Science Fic-tion and Fantasy for Teens” is a fraction of the size of itsgrown-up counterparts, which says volumes aboutwhat’s not out there, even with an “honor roll” of runners-up listed on a back page.

What’s worse, the stories were culled from magazines,websites and anthologies written for adults, and there’seven a golden oldie from Rudyard Kipling. The storiesfeature youthful protagonists or at least have kids in thebackground, as in “Sergeant Chip,” narrated by an attackdog with enhanced intelligence (courtesy of the U.S.Army) whose dying captain utters a final order to guard arefugee family at all costs.

Never mind that talking-dog stories would be a groan-inducing cliché in any other genre. Fairies wouldn’t bewelcome in most serious-minded young adult bookseither, but that’s someone else’s loss. Forget gossamerwings and stardust, however. In Kelly Link’s “The FaerieHandbag,” pixies live in a dog-skin purse, along with an

unhappy dog, and frantic Genevieve works against timeand long odds as she roots through thrift-store bins tofind them.

Fairies can be a tough bunch, as love-struck Neef dis-covers when she’s pressed into service by the magicalFolk who really run the New York Public Library in DeliaSherman’s comic “CATNYP.” Neef sets out to researchhuman love and instead pines for a cute guy she meets atthe library. All the guy wants is to be a hero — and notnecessarily Neef’s. The Folk have a way of grantingwishes in the most unexpected and nerve-racking ofways.

Neef’s attempt at romance is a rare one in this collec-tion, where puppy love and teen rebellion are usuallyskimmed over or skipped entirely. There’s a smidgen ofsibling rivalry in Adam Stemple’s “A Piece of Flesh,” withbig sister Victoria failing to muster the warm fuzzies forthe new baby, who naturally turns out to be a changeling,a life-draining imp swapped for her real sibling. There’sno real “aha” moment for her character, except to buckup and fight the interloper.

It’s as if all those demons in the flesh obviate the needto battle internal ones. But don’t mistake the lack of self-awareness — notorious among teens — with pat or per-functory storytelling. Few of the stories in “The Year’sBest Science Fiction and Fantasy for Teens” wrap theirendings in a big, happily-ever-after bow, which makes thecharacters more likely to live on in the dark imaginings ofthe reader. It’s heartening to read works that, at the veryleast, don’t pander and that firmly relegate childhoodcertainties to the attic with outgrown jammies and aban-doned Lego sets.

It should only happen more often. 8

Dark imaginingsof the teen mind

Pol Turgeon For The Times

Anne Boles Levy, a reviewer whose work has appearedin The Times, writes a children’s book blog atwww.bookbuds.net.