House on Fortune Street (Livesey)

The House on Fortune Street
Margot Livesey, 2008
HarperCollins
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780061451546

Summary
It seems like mutual good luck for Abigail Taylor and Dara MacLeod when they meet at university and, despite their differences, become fast friends. Years later they remain inseparable: Abigail, the actress, allegedly immune to romance, and Dara, a therapist, throwing herself into relationships with frightening intensity.

Now both believe they've found "true love." But luck seems to run out when Dara moves into Abigail's downstairs apartment. Suddenly both their friendship and their relationships are in peril, for tragedy is waiting to strike the house on Fortune Street. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—July 24, 1953
• Where—Perth, Scotland, UK
• Education—B.A., University of York, England
• Awards—L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award
• Currently—Boston, Massachusetts, USA


Margot Livesey is a Scottish born writer. She is the author of eight novels, numerous short stories, and essays on the craft of writing fiction.

Livesey came to North America during the 1970s where she worked to get her fiction published, reportedly because her boyfriend at the time was also a writer.

Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, and a number of literary quarterlies. She is also the Fiction Editor at Ploughshares, a renowned literary journal. Livesey served as a judge for the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction in 2012.

She currently lives in the Boston area and is the writer-in-residence at Emerson College and at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She has formally served as a professor at Boston University, Bowdoin College, Tufts University, Carnegie Mellon University, Brandeis University, Cleveland State University, Williams College, and at the University of California, Irvine. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 9/16/2016.)

When asked by Barnes and Noble editors in 2004, what book influenced her the most, Livesey had this to say:

This sounds self-centered but the book that had the biggest impact on me as a writer was the novel I wrote when I was twenty-two and traveling around Europe and North Africa. When I reread it at the end of the year I was amazed at how completely I had failed to be influenced by the many wonderful books I'd read. My characters were unbelievable, their conversations preposterous, the plot simultaneously dull and far-fetched, etc., etc. Seeing the enormous gap between the books I loved and my own was what made me want to be a writer in a serious way.

Book Reviews
What does it mean to be an unmarried woman?.... In her new novel, The House on Fortune Street, Margot Livesey brings nuance, context and a cool head to this hot-button issue through detailed portraits of two friends in their 30s: Abigail, who owns the house of the title, and Dara, who rents the downstairs apartment. Both women are unmarried, but they have distinct emotional templates and back stories that give them different ideas about the role men ought to play in their lives.… Livesey, the author of half a dozen previous works of fiction, is a lovely, cautious writer. She likes to take her time building the atmosphere her characters move through, adding increments of color, dot by dot.
Liesl Schillinger - New York Times

For all its melancholy, the novel leaves readers with a surprising hopefulness. Some of this arises from the pleasures of its style: Livesey has chosen every detail here with precision, from toast crumbs to paint colors, to evoke the shimmering illusion of these characters' home-based lives. For all her care, the construction feels effortless. Even the stark divisions of the book into quarters seem inevitable rather than jarring.
Donna Rifkind - Washington Post

The absorbing latest from Livesey (Homework) opens multiple perspectives on the life of Dara MacLeod, a young London therapist, partly by paying subtle homage to literary figures and works. The first of four sections follows Keats scholar Sean Wyman: his girlfriend, Abigail, is Dara's best friend, and the couple lives upstairs from Dara in the titular London house. While Dara tries to coax her boyfriend Edward to move out of the house he shares with his ex-girlfriend and daughter, Sean receives a mysterious letter implying that Abigail is having an affair, and both relationships start to fall apart. The second section, set during Dara's childhood, is narrated by Dara's father, who has a strange fascination with Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll) and shares Dodgson's creepy interest in young girls. Dara's meeting with Edward dominates part three, which mirrors the plot of Jane Eyre, and the final part, reminiscent of Great Expectations, is told mainly from Abigail's college-era point of view. The pieces cross-reference and fit together seamlessly, with Dara's fate being revealed by the end of part one and explained in the denouement. Livesey's use of the classics enriches the narrative, giving Dara a larger-than-life resonance.
Publishers Weekly

Life has a way of parceling out both good luck and bad, and for the residents of the duplex on the ironically named Fortune Street.... Intricately weaving the cause and effect of each character’s circumstances into four self-contained but essentially linked episodes, Livesey, polished and intriguing as ever, explores the sinuous themes of regret and responsibility, truth and trust with an understated, yet tenacious certainty. —Carol Haggas
Booklist

Dara, a therapist at a women's center, lives in the downstairs flat of her friend Abigail's London home. A workaholic actress and theatrical producer, Abigail lives upstairs with her boyfriend, Sean, a struggling Keats scholar and writer. Although Dara and Abigail were best friends in college, their lives are so busy there is not much time for getting together. Sean is financially strapped and agrees to coauthor a book on euthanasia. He suspects Abigail is having an affair. Dara is involved with a married man she is perennially sure will leave his wife. And although she is often able to help her clients with their problems, Dara has never resolved issues revolving around her parents' divorce. Her father, Cameron, has never been able to tell her he struggled with attractions to young girls, whom he photographed obsessively. How these four characters ultimately fail at connecting with each other results in a tragedy three will regret for the rest of their lives. Livesey's latest novel (after Banishing Verona) keeps readers brooding over the power of secrets in this dark and disturbing psychological tale. Recommended for literary fiction collections.
Keddy Ann Outlaw - Library Journal

Love proves a destructive force in the lives of four Brits who have divergent perspectives on their interrelated dilemmas in another probing, satisfying novel from Livesey (Banishing Verona, 2004, etc.). In its first section, the story seems to be about a selfish, heartless actress, Abigail, who breaks up poor graduate student Sean's marriage, then sleeps with his university chum Valentine. Abigail's so busy and preoccupied she doesn't notice that her best friend, Dara, is in suicidal despair over a lying lover-but then again, neither does Sean until he comes across Dara's body in the downstairs flat of the house they all share on Fortune Street in London. The book's second section concerns Dara's childhood, seen through the eyes of her father Cameron, who has an unconsummated but unwholesome interest in prepubescent girls. His wife throws him out when she realizes his fondness for Dara's best friend is more than fatherly, and we see in the third section that his daughter has never recovered from Cameron's abrupt disappearance when she was ten. We also see that Dara is partly responsible for her disappointments in love, because she makes her boyfriends the obsessive center of her life. She's rather shocked by Abigail's casual attitude toward sex; even though the two women have been close since they met at university, their totally different personalities often chafe. Abigail, whose feckless parents let her work her way through both high school and university, is tough-minded and something of a user. She loves Dara, but can't understand her friend's neurotic vulnerability. In the moving final pages, Cameron confesses to Abigail what he could never tell Dara, and both confront their failures. "There was no question of them forgiving each other," Abigail bleakly concludes. Yet the novel is filled with sorrowful wisdom about the fallible human heart and our myopic view of ourselves and those we love. Moving, gruffly tender and piercingly truthful. Livesey has plenty of critical respect already, but her talents merit a broad popular audience as well.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Sean is characterized as someone who would rather not revisit "uncomfortable memories," and, as the anonymous letter says, "see what's right in front of [his] face." Is this tendency particular to Sean alone, or do other characters in the book suffer from the same myopia?

2. When Cameron takes Dara to the Charles Dodgson exhibit, he is trying to share something of himself with her. What makes him step back and, once again, refrain from divulging more of his inner life? Would telling her have helped Dara?

3. Is Dara deluding herself in her belief that Edward will leave his wife? How do Edward's intentions look through the eyes of other characters?

4. What role does coincidence play in the stories of all four characters? What role does it play in bringing the threads of these stories together?

5. Several characters in this book are profoundly affected by a past event, which they're never able either to come to terms with, or to fully understand. What is Livesey saying about the nature of childhood memories, particularly traumatic ones?

6. What role do letters play in the novel? What kind of information do they contain and, in each instance, how do they change the course of the narrative?

7. Each main character in the book has an affinity with a specific literary figure: Sean with John Keats; Cameron with Charles Dodgson; Dara with Charlotte Brontë; and Abigail with Charles Dickens. How do these "literary godparents" complement the reader's understanding of each character and his or her situation?

8. Abigail's story comes last. How does our view of Abigail—both in her dealings with Sean, and her dealings with Dara—change when we see events play out through her eyes? What part of Abigail's background is most influential in the formation of her character?

9. The story of The House on Fortune Street comes to us, piece by piece, through the perspectives of four characters. How does the order of the voices affect your reading of the novel as a whole?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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