Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #723741 in Books
• Published on: 2005-05-31
• Released on: 2005-05-31
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 688 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. The most remarkable thing about this extraordinary debut novel is not that the author is 72 years old; it is in the risks Chadwick, a retired civil servant, takes and brings off with astute craftsmanship and touching sincerity. The narrator, Tom Ripple, whose life we follow from the 1970s into the 21st century, is a lower-middle-class Englishman devoid of charm, intellectual curiosity and emotional warmth. Only gradually does the reader come to understand why Ripple's responses are stunted, why his preferred mode of communication is through excruciatingly bad puns and double entendres and why he subsists on a steady diet of television action films and paperback thrillers. When his wife leaves him, taking their two children, he is resigned to loneliness. As the years pass, Ripple cautiously engages in new relationships; he acquires the knack for tender paternal love and true friendship, and he develops an appreciation of music and books that brings him joy. Throughout, he continues to seek meaning in a postmodern world. Chadwick's almost seamlessly subtle portrait of Ripple gathers depth and momentum as the narrative progresses. In the end, Ripple concludes, with typical modesty, that it is "the basic experiences [of life], the ordinary moments of affection and beauty and common kindness that are infinitely precious." It's not an earthshaking thought, but it signifies the metamorphosis of an empty, soulless man into a hero for our times. Agent, Zoe Pagnamenta. (June 1)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The New Yorker
Returning from a trip abroad, Tom Ripple, the diarist narrator of this lengthy début, reflects, "I seem mainly to have recorded trivia, like someone who witnesses an epic battle and sees only the surrounding scenery." Trivia, indeed, consumes many of Tom's musings, but Chadwick's achievement is such that Ripple's small thoughts—slight observations, petty miseries, daily regrets—come to seem worthy of center stage. From young parenthood to early retirement and beyond, Tom gives a painstaking, and often profoundly unflattering, account of his inner life. He loathes his wife and his boss, feels baffled by his children, and lusts after almost every female form. As time passes, however, his understanding is deepened by both loss and success. Following him on this journey may require more stamina than some readers can spare, but, as in life, to reach the end is to complete a story at once ordinary and unique.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

From The Washington Post
If It's All Right Now were a lesser work, the story of its creator might overwhelm it. Charles Chadwick is a 72-year-old retired British civil servant. The image of a lifelong bureaucrat emerging from piles of moldering forms with a jewel-like manuscript and being ushered into the light of literary accolades and six-figure advances (in pounds sterling, mind you) is compelling but fanciful. It's All Right Now is Chadwick's fifth novel, merely the first to be published. If the assured and diverse characterizations and confident pacing appear to be the work of a lifelong novelist, it is because they are.

The novel charts 30 years in the life of British accountant Tom Ripple. He is as bland and mild as his name suggests, possessed of many ordinary desires and antipathies; at first glance he seems emblematic of the forgotten man, toiling in obscurity, the recipient of a retirement watch, a man whose absence inspires little reflection. As a marketing ploy, a 700-page tome trafficking in the minutiae of a middle-aged corporate cog leaves much to be desired. Even readers with a taste for complexity will be challenged by Ripple's occasionally lugubrious ruminations and the attendant microscopic level of detail. The novel is, at points, as boring as Ripple's own existence.

But Chadwick gives us Ripple from the inside out. The book is ostensibly Ripple's memoir, although it is organized more as a disconnected series of reminiscences, produced from volumes of notes, a project he commenced as a junior employee of a London-based import and export concern in order to appear busy at work. Writing fulfills several functions for Ripple. It is cathartic, helping him exorcise his intense dislike of his younger, more ambitious supervisor. It is confessional, as when he confides the occasional arousal he experiences at the sight of his maturing daughter, Virginia. And it is an expression of self-effacement, as when he writes: "Had I been less ordinary, how much more might I have made of things, what more might I have understood, more might I have done? But then there would have been less to write about, less need for it rather, my usefulness to the world speaking eloquently enough for itself."

That Tom Ripple hasn't made much of his life is transmitted, at least by Ripple's lights, as an article of faith. He married a woman more educated and ambitious than himself, a social worker whose relentless drive to put mundane events in abstruse, theoretical terms is maddening, even if Ripple himself cannot bring himself to inveigh against it. "My wife is an eminently reasonable woman," he notes. "It is a key aspect of her eminence in general." He cedes control over the household to her and contents himself with American cop shows, the odd game of badminton, pornography he keeps stashed in the office and, when a promotion makes it possible, liaisons with foreign prostitutes on business trips.

It is not a marriage built to last, and it does not. When he is laid off during a merger, his wife moves out of their North London house with their son and daughter. Ripple decamps to a village just inland from the Suffolk coast. It is only the first sojourn of a long retirement. He is inducted into village life, consorting with a menagerie of East Anglian eccentrics: a retired government official who all but wears his Officer of the British Empire medal pinned to his chest, a snide real estate agent, a gaggle of hippie artisans who make crafts at a local arts center and a retired army colonel and his American wife.

But as quickly as he arrived, he's gone, pushed out under the accumulated weight of social embarrassment. He relocates to London, where he again becomes involved with an eclectic assortment of neighbors. There are stories here, overlapping and complex, that need not be recounted to commend Chadwick's book. If Ripple's were a sleepy retirement, then his unassuming tendency to drift would blur seamlessly and tediously with the novel. But a subtle momentum gathers in the wake of events, under which Ripple appears to revise his estimation of his own humanity, his need for connection, community and love. These tendencies grow in him the older he gets and the more he writes. As such, the writing assumes a richness and even occasional majesty that it thoroughly lacks in the early pages, although even patient readers might be forgiven for giving up on It's All Right Now without ever reaching the conclusion. During the last of the novel's four sections Ripple explains his decision to move to the coast with a lyrical recollection of happier times, before the breakup of his marriage: "In that moment I believed that if I'd listened long and hard enough the voices would have sounded clear in the wind, that if I'd suddenly turned there we'd be on our knees round a sand-castle, hurrying to finish it before the tide came in."

An easy criticism of Chadwick's style would be to suggest that early on he goes to too great lengths to convey his protagonist's lack of literary gifts, his fondness for execrable puns and an inclination toward cliché. But this plodding beginning sets the stage for the execution of one of the trickier literary maneuvers -- the honest representation of slow change.

Reviewed by Adam Mazmanian
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

Customer Reviews

It's all read now
This is decidedly not a book you can't put down. It's more a book you keep putting down and returning to later. Written as a fictional memoir, it is comprised of a large number of vignettes along the fictional author's life. As such, it would have been an excellent novel for serializing. There isn't enough action or drive to keep you reading hour after hour, but there is enough charm to keep you coming back. So this is best as a book to work through in pieces when you are between other books or just want a short stretch of light reading.

At heart it is the reflections of an undistinguished man with a sense of humor about all the people around him, and about the life he leads but is largely detached from. It is filled with excellent character studies, but that only adds to the episodic nature of the journey. It is a book worth reading, but only on its own terms. Don't expect to be sucked in and swept away.

A Slow Start, But Ultimately Rewarding
"It's All Right Now" is an unusual book. It is essentially a diary spanning several decades in the life of Tom Ripple, an unremarkable English fellow. The book starts very slowly and it reminds me of some of Nicholson Baker's works in its excruciatingly detailed descriptions of mundane domestic happenings. To be honest, the first third of the book is tedious, rambling and exhausting and more than once I was tempted to put it away.

Chadwick peppers his writing with numerous parenthetical comments and introspective musings and his often clumsy self-aware commentary ("You probably skipped most of that" and "I sit at this typewriter, unable to sleep", for example) becomes awkward at times. In one particularly odd scene, Ripple makes some rather creepy observations about his daughter and then reveals his desire to see her naked. He then goes on to ponder the potential "wholesomeness" of incest. I could have also done without a remarkably vivid description of Tom's threadbare yellow underpants.

However, as Chadwick matures, so does his writing. He is at his best when describing the beauty of nature and the weaknesses of his fellow man. Particularly touching are Tom's last conversations with his mother and father as well as an extraordinarily beautiful chapter describing his last meeting with his ill daughter-in-law.

People feel comfortable confiding in Tom Ripple, and these moments also ring true. The neighbor with the alcoholic wife, the other neighbor who confesses his constant depression and yet another neighbor with an insane daughter all trust Tom with their secrets. He listens intently and politely to their stories, offers his sympathy and does whatever he can to help.

"It's All Right Now" peters out at the end, but if you stick with it and you can get past Tom Ripple's insecurity and corny jokes, you will be rewarded with occasional eloquent insights and a vivid sense of what it means to live a life of quiet kindness.

Quite an Interesting Novel
This is a very, very long first novel published by a 72 year old Briton. What makes it unique is that the author has chosen to recount in some 679 pages much of the daily life of a quite ordinary, middle class man who is in his 40's (and married with young children) when the story commences (I should estimate in the late 1950's or the 1960's). The novel demonstrates that there can be drama in the "untold stories" of everyday living. So, don't expect exciting James Bond plots or John Grisham. Rather, the central character (Tom Ripple) commits to paper the commonplace events in his life as they unfold, involving such topics as marriage, divorce, children (both young and as adults), insufferable bosses, growing older, the impact of severe medical conditions, and the consequences of early retirement from one's employment. The novel is in four sections, and carries through until Mr. Ripple appears to be on death's doorstep, as we pass into the 21st century. It is the skill with which the author writes about these common occurrences that makes the novel so interesting. While the book certainly could have done with a bit more concise editing, it never is dull and moves along quite nicely. An illuminating interview with the author is included. If seeking a unique read, this is the book.