It's All Right Now: A Novel

by Charles Chadwick

Overview

Meet Tom Ripple, a man with an uncommon outlook on his common life. Through the vividness of his voice and his growing sense of the sorrow and absurdity of the world, Tom Ripple becomes an unusually appealing antihero, aware of his ordinariness and the limits of his intelligence, with a ribald sense of humor, and a clumsiness in his attempts at emotional connection with others. He is a bewildered everyman navigating his way through modern times.

By turns poignant, funny, heartbreaking, and profound, It's All Right Now is a towering achievement and a singular work of the imagination.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780060742874
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	06/27/2006
Series:	P.S. Series
Pages:	704
Product dimensions:	5.31(w) x 8.00(h) x 1.12(d)

About the Author

Charles Chadwick has lived and worked in England, Canada, Kenya, Nigeria, Zambia, Brazil, and Poland. He lives in London. This is his first novel.

What People are Saying About This

Jonathan Safran Foer

“This novel is huge—in size, ambition, intelligence, and heart.”

Editorial Reviews

This novel is huge—in size, ambition, intelligence, and heart.” — Jonathan Safran Foer

From the Publisher

This novel is huge—in size, ambition, intelligence, and heart.

Jonathan Safran Foer

A sprawling saga of the English suburbs, a sort of East Enders for north Londoners, that's attracted more attention across the pond for the debut author's age and the size of his U.S. advance than for its literary qualities. That's unfortunate, for 72-year-old Chadwick, who has knocked around the world and apparently draws much on his experiences here, has a quiet but assured way with a sentence. Tom Ripple, his protagonist and narrator, is a middling middle-ager when we meet him in the early 1970s; he works without satisfaction ("My job is to produce tables and charts showing trends in sales and the like"), lives with a wife with whom he shares a clenched-hair failure to communicate ("My wife does not play games, perhaps on principle. I'm not sure, I've never asked her") and two children who can barely be stirred from the telly. His neighbors are strange but not overtly extraordinary (covertly, yes, to be sure), and everyone seems a bit baffled that the nation came out ahead in WWII and has got to its present state. Time passes. Tom has aged ten years, Margaret Thatcher is now in office, he's out of the grip of his hated boss, out of his marriage and even further removed from his children, whose lives are taking contours he cannot understand. As his son inches out of the closet, Tom explains to himself that "sex, or whatever it's called these days, isn't everything"; just so, he scarcely recognizes London, now a world city full of strange sights and sounds. Things don't get more comprehensible as another decade passes and the millennium approaches; Tom huffs and puffs his way uphill, literally and figuratively, acquires a wider and wiser view of things, and extends himself even aseveryone else in his bewildering world finds more reason to pull up the carapace. All very true to life, in other words, with no car chases or explosions. Nothing much happens, but it does so with a world-weary elegance, full of wintry discontent. Mature, knowing and very well done.

Kirkus Reviews