Compelling… Beautiful writing… With a dramatist's sure touch, Frayn introduces a ticking hand grenade on page 107 that may have you saying to yourself: ‘Oh. My. God.'” —The New York Times Book Review
“What a lovely tribute… Funny when it needs to be, touching when it needs to be, and cast in smooth, beguiling prose.” —Washington Post
“Beautifully rendered and seriously funny.” —Boston Globe
“A beautifully written portrait of a vanished way of life and a fondly humorous, very affecting work of homage and love.” —Salon
“A wry, unsentimental, but deeply felt family history… The narrative turns wistful as it surveys the gulf—of temperament, circumstance, and class—that opens between father and son as the author pursues an academic and literary life.” —The New Yorker
“Endearing… Part of the fortune of the book's title is the gift of storytelling. It is because of this inheritance that we have Frayn's brilliant body of work—which now, thankfully, includes this accomplished memoir.” —Time Out New York
“Engrossing… This finely detailed remembrance displays subtle wit and powers of perception that magnify every nook and cranny of ordinary life into something extraordinary.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Exquisitely written… Frayn's thoughtful, obsessive, darkly funny exegesis of his father's life is a heroic recreation of a vanished world.” —Maclean's (Canada)
“After the brilliant plays—both comic and cerebral—and the subtle novels, one of our best contemporary writers has made the family memoir his own. Not a line, still less a thought, is stale or predictable.” —The Daily Telegraph (UK)
“Genuinely delving, yet decently guarded, My Father's Fortune is often very funny and soaked in a wistful sort of melancholy that deepens into a compelling sadness. Frayn has written books that make a bigger bang, but none that is so touching.” —The Guardian (UK)
“Ranging from comic star turns to passages of piercingly lucid melancholy, My Father's Fortune adroitly modulates between humor and tragedy, ruefulness and celebration, intellectual keenness and elegiac depths of feeling. A writer who has long been one of our most engrossingly inquiring minds, Frayn has never written with more searching brilliance than in this quest for his past.” —The Sunday Times (UK)
“Frayn at his very best.” —The Observer (UK)
“Often funny, sometimes painful, but always exquisitely well written, My Father's Fortune reveals the extraordinariness that can lurk in even the most ordinary of lives.” —The Sunday Telegraph (UK)
“Entrancing... Forever alert to the inner processes of art and mind, Frayn from time to time nips backstage to show how the memoir machinery works. Yet this keen self-awareness never compromises the deep poignancy—and the rich comedy—of the story he has to tell. As always, that's part of the trick of it for Frayn.” —The Independent (UK)
My Father's Fortune is funny when it needs to be, touching when it needs to be, and for the most part is cast in smooth, beguiling prose…a lovely tribute.
—The Washington Post
It is not [Frayn's] fault that, as he puts it, "my father moved lightly over the earth, scarcely leaving a footprint, scarcely a shadow." Yet the problem remains—turning Tom Frayn's life story into compelling stuff. That said, by the end, it has become compelling…This is beautiful writing. This is Michael Frayn's gift, not so much to his father, who one guesses would probably just have shrugged, but to a daughter who wanted to know what it had all been like. Rebecca's fortune is quite a large one.
—The New York Times
A sprightly, warmhearted memoir of his dapper salesman father takes playwright and novelist Frayn (Spies) from working-class London through two world wars. Thomas Frayn died in 1970 at the age of 69, largely deaf but still actively selling roofing to contractors in London, a widower who later remarried, and whose enterprising, responsible spirit bequeathed a "fortune" to his son much later in life. The Frayn clan filled a cramped house in a rough neighborhood in Halloway, North London; Tom Frayn left school at age 14, marked as a "smart lad," gaining a clerk's wages that were needed to support the family. Married in 1931 to Violet "Vi" Lawson, who similarly had to quit a prestigious music school to go to work, Tom moved his family to Ewell Village, Surrey, where the author and his younger sister grew up within the stolid middle class. Michael Frayn, however, was not destined to be the brilliant cricketer and wit that his father envisioned, but rather "as dozy as a weekend motorist." The sudden death of his mother of a heart attack when he was 12 "hardened" the author, drove him inward, and he became enamored with music and poetry, eventually attending Cambridge and becoming a journalist. Here is a son's proud, gently poking tribute to the remarkable qualities of an ordinary man, if only on the outside. (Mar.)
In his first autobiographical work, award-winning English playwright/New York Times best-selling novelist Frayn pays tribute to his father, Tom, and recalls his own provincial English childhood. Tom, a charming roofing salesman, grew up in a home crammed with immediate and extended family members, all of whom were deaf. With a lighthearted brogue and a strong work ethic, he rose from the trenches of extreme poverty. Frayn does not mythologize his father; rather, he celebrates him as an imperfect everyman whose fortunes were bleak at times. He writes elegantly and with finesse, making such seemingly mundane details as the placement of furniture and untold hours of cricket practice amusing. British actor/Audie Award winner Martin Jarvis's stodgy, upper-crust narration well suits Frayn's cerebral style. At times long-winded, this title may not attract a wide audience, but it will appeal to Frayn devotees and fans of British literature. Purchase where demand warrants.—Risa Getman, Hendrick Hudson Free Lib., Montrose, NY
One of the purposes of audiobooks is to allow us to listen to stories of love, family, and tragedy in the care of a narrator who can bring them all alive. In this book, the author has written a love letter to his father, and in having done so, he treats us to a slice of history. Narrator Martin Jarvis uncannily captures the mood of this book with his inflections, pacing, and subtle character voices. His British accent and crystal-clear diction transport us back to the pre-WWII era, when snappy language and local pronunciations defined one’s place in the social order. It sounds as though Jarvis has a perpetual smile on his face while reading, losing it only when we come to the event that profoundly changed Frayn’s father’s life. R.I.G. © AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine
A British novelist and playwright's memoir about growing up with a near-deaf, roofing-salesman father.
Although it takes a few chapters for the narrative to gain its footing, this finely detailed remembrance displays subtle wit and powers of perception that magnify every nook and cranny of ordinary life into something extraordinary. Frayn (Travels with a Typewriter: A Reporter at Large, 2009, etc.) begins with his hearing-impaired father's marriage in the late 1930s. By the time children materialize, the Frayn family has moved from gritty North London to the leafier outland of Ewell, 12 miles outside the city. Frayn's father pursued the same middle-class suburban dreams of many families at the time, when a respectable suburban home could be purchased for less than £1,000. As the book gains steam, it's tough to judge whether the author has photographic mental recall, or if his attentiveness to detail can be attributed to a particularly imaginative sense of historical embellishment. Whatever the case, Frayn evokes the sights, sounds and smells of his boyhood as if it had all taken place yesterday. The author's prose particularly shines when he conjures the dread of V-2 bombings over London during the Blitz. Frayn's dry, Orwellian sense of humor doesn't creep into the narrative until he describes the specific ways in which he failed to live up to his father's hopes for an athletically inclined child—the young author was physically awkward and "slow witted" and didn't embrace conventional sport until much later in life. As the memoir progresses into Frayn's adolescent years, the emphasis subtly shifts to his own exploits as a junior intellectual and culture snob. His father's "fortune," as one might expect, turns out to be much more important than the kind of inheritance found in a retirement account.
A consistently understated, mostly engrossing read.
