A Serious Man

by David Storey

As playwright, painter and novelist, Richard Fenchurch has been both successful and rich, but now, in his mid-sixties, he's beginning to fall apart: again. His daughter plucks him from the squalor of his London house and installs him in the old family home, the mansion where he courted his first wife. Here, in a familiar house and in a changed though recognisable landscape, Fenchurch struggles to keep his grip on freedom and sanity, and allows himself to relax into memory. Time is catching up with him, but it is memory that produces the more startling revelation. Fenchurch's love for his wife was real enough - it was a successful marriage as these things go - but the old surroundings, both the building and the land itself, bring back to him the irresistibly ardent drive of his passionate affair with Isabella, his fiancée's mother. Returning to fiction after fourteen years, David Storey has created both a sharply comic vision of the indignities of age and a delicately erotic evocation of a youthful and dangerous affair.

Genres: Contemporary, British Literature, Fiction

358 pages, Paperback

First published June 25, 1998

About the author

David Storey was an English playwright, screenwriter, award-winning novelist and a former professional rugby league player. Storey was born in Wakefield, Yorkshire in 1933, and studied at the Slade School of Art.

His first two novels were both published in 1960, a few months apart: This Sporting Life, which won the Macmillan Fiction Award and was adapted for an award-winning 1963 film, and Flight Into Camden, which won the Somerset Maugham Award. His next novel, Radcliffe (1963) met with widespread critical acclaim in both England and the United States, and during the 1960s and 70s, Storey became widely known for his plays, several of which achieved great success.

He returned to fiction in 1972 with Pasmore, which won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Award and was short-listed for the Booker Prize. Saville (1976) won the Booker Prize and has been hailed by at least one critic as the best of all the Booker winners. His last novel was Thin-Ice Skater (2004).

David Storey lived in London. He was married and had four children.

Reviews

[Mike]

I gave this book 1 star as it failed to really interest or excite me. Storey is a successful British author with several of his earlier books getting decent ratings in Goodreads. Though I didn’t, I imagine some people will like this book a lot. Storey is an intellectual – this is a serious story, the writing highbrow.

I don’t usually persist in reading a book to the end that I don’t like. But in this case I did. And it all was because early in the book (pp 12) I was enchanted by an idea: “It’s not the inscrutability of the observer that qualifies his or her judgments but the warmth, the dedication, the love they bring to their subject.” I read on hopeful of finding other challenging ideas. There were a lot of ideas/opinions/observations about life throughout the book but they for the most part failed to excite me because either/both: (a) the prose was too difficult to unravel, or (b) the ideas themselves were mad/nonsensical.

The book essentially is an autobiography of a moderately successful painter/writer of 65, recently released from 5 years internment in an asylum for a combination of depression and anxiety disorder. So he was “mad”, and continued in the story to exhibit behaviors which stood to get him re-admitted. So one shouldn’t expect lucid prose from a madman. Well James Joyce fans may like that, I don’t.

One dominant feature of his life on which he frequently dwells was his love affair with the mother of the woman he married. This stretches ones credulity (36 year age difference). He has to make this believable for his story to be believable. But the mother is always painted in glowing terms. Yet as he states at one point in the novel “How could a woman fall in love with her daughter’s lover without the slightest guilt, remorse, or as far as I could discern, anguish?” How indeed? He never did explain. And so failed a major plot element in the book.

Maybe a book difficult to read because of its prose style and disjointed narrative, with some serious issues about key aspects of plot, and about someone you don’t really like, will be saved by a strong ending. No it wasn’t – it ended unresolved.

[Robert Wechsler]

What made this novel for me was the quality of Storey's prose, which is characterized by parenthetical and appositive phrases, but enough to drive (at least me) crazy. A lesser writer would not, I think, have been able to keep my interest in the mad (sometimes like a fox) first-person narrator, who is (or, more accurately, was) himself a novelist. His relationship with his wife’s mother is something very special.

Fortunately, despite the narrator’s seriousness, there is a good bit of humor in the novel. Its principal negative for me was its length.

[David Mundy]

For about the first quarter of this book I was impressed and drawn in. The writing style was quite approachable, the content intriguing and rather dark. All downhill after that, and in the end I masochistically struggled to the finish line. It was like being forced to listen to a never-ending rant - one which contained a few intelligent insights, but soon I was siding with those around him having to deal with the narrator/ hero Richard Fenchurch, which I suspect was not quite the intention. Somewhere within this book is an interesting account of a kind of agitated depression, but this aspect went on way too long, and the more it did so, the lower my assessment went.
I'd be very reluctant to attempt this author again - a shame perhaps, as clearly there's an intelligence there, but I'd certainly caution against approaching this turgid saga.
Also, the constant shifts between first and third person, and the confusion of who said what, however intentional, were exasperating.

[Razvan Banciu]

Somehow sad that a man in his mid-6o's is seen as he had reached the end of the road.
And there is no wonder that Richard Fenchurch, the man we're speaking about, finds memories more attractive than present...

[Dario Malic]

Storey priča život jednog 65-ogodišnjeg umjetnika (pisca i slikara) koji je počeo gubiti kontakt sa stvarnim svijetom. U skladu s njegovim umom koji se, izazvan nekim sitnim detaljem ili pak ponekad apsolutno ničim, prebacuje u prošle trenutke i miješa događaje i ljude iz vlastite prošlosti s onima trenutnima, priča skače s događaja na događaj bez ikakvog vremenskog slijeda i uz vrlo oštre prijelaze. Takav stil je u početku zanimljiv, ali s vremenom postaje zamoran, pogotovo jer Storey piše poprilično začahureno i čitatelj treba skidati sloj po sloj uglavnom dosadnih događaja da bi došao do tek ponekad zanimljive misli ili ideje. Ima tu par zanimljivih opservacija o umjetnosti, ljubavi i životu općenito, ali one se nekako sve nalaze u prvoj polovici romana, pa se postavlja pitanje čemu uopće ona druga?