A compulsively readable novel that caricatures political commitment
There are some people with a gift for conviction — a talent for cutting a line through the jumbled phenomena of world affairs and saying ‘I’m in. This is my position’,” muses a friend of the Litvinoff family.
The Litvinoff household is strewn with Amandla aprons, political posters and tottering ziggurats of books. They are, to observers, creatures of unassailable radical belief.

Fifty-eight-year-old Audrey is an unmitigated shrew (that she acquired her brash façade to hide her youthful insecurities is no mitigation). As her daughter observes, while Audrey congratulates herself for her audacious honesty, no one “actually shared Audrey’s ugly view of the world. It was not the truth of her observations that make people laugh, but their unfairness, their surreal cruelty”. For all her flintiness, she is utterly innocent of the actual business of union work (to the contempt of her working class son-in-law).

Her husband Joel Litvinoff is a superstar lefty lawyer who has made a career defending political pariahs, and his more worldly politics is leavened with impulses of self-interest. Joel is a recognisable combination of good humour, testosterone and worldly, middle-aged radicalism — he views his wife’s stands with indulgence, partly because he thinks it is a “feminine prerogative to have unreasonable political opinions”.

Though he spends much of the novel in a coma, he cuts a vivid figure — making French toast on weekends and lecturing his kids on armed insurgency, in his wildly swinging bathrobe. He, as Audrey discovers, also had a secret life and an illegitimate child, sending her carefully nurtured idea of herself and her marriage into a tailspin.

... contd.