Jude Cook
Game, Set & Love Match
When the Essingers, a middle-class family from Texas with four very different grown-up children, converge on New York for a long weekend, family tensions inevitably resurface. This is the basic plot of Ben Markovits’s sophisticated and engrossing eighth novel, yet there is so much more going on too.
On one level, the Essingers’ story is one of successful American immigration and integration. Patriarch Bill’s Jewish parents came to the USA to ‘sell groceries’, but they take against him for marrying out. They even consult a rabbi, hoping he will ask their son how he can marry ‘a woman who is not only Christian but German? As if these things don’t matter, history doesn’t matter, religion doesn’t matter.’ But Bill builds a family in which these things end up mattering less than love, happy children and the self-confidence that comes from successful careers.
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'Thirkell was a product of her time and her class. For her there are no sacred cows, barring those that win ribbons at the Barchester Agricultural.'
The novelist Angela Thirkell is due a revival, says Patricia T O'Conner (£).
https://literaryreview.co.uk/good-gad
'Only in Britain, perhaps, could spy chiefs – conventionally viewed as masters of subterfuge – be so highly regarded as ethical guides.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-spy-who-taught-me
In this month's Bookends, @AdamCSDouglas looks at the curious life of Henry Labouchere: a friend of Bram Stoker, 'loose cannon', and architect of the law that outlawed homosexual activity in Britain.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-gross-indecency