Detailed item info | Synopsis | Beginning in the 1970s, IT'S ALL RIGHT NOW follows Tom Ripple for 30+ years as he lives his lonely and unremarkable suburban life. He is deserted by his wife and children, lives alone, watches TV and reads junk to pass the time. But gradually, Ripple finds a way to go on, and by the end of the novel, as he's facing old age, this very ordinary chap has evolved, surprisingly but convincingly, into a much more complicated (and satisfied) man--and, in his story, the reader also sees the changes that have taken place over the same period in Great Britain. Charles Chadwick published this diary-like epic novel--his first--when he was 72.
| | Size | | Length: | 677 pages | | Height: | 9.3 in. | | Width: | 6.5 in. | | Thickness: | 1.5 in. | | Weight: | 38.4 oz. |
| | Publisher's Note | Meet Tom Ripple, a man with an uncommon outlook on his common life. At home in a North London suburb, Ripple keeps close tabs on his neighbors while his own family splinters apart. As the years pass by he forges on, bravely and awkwardly, in his relationships with his wife and children, his parents, girlfriends, colleagues, and friends, and in his ongoing search for certainties, both moral and practical. But what he gains in wisdom over time, he loses in love, as his marriage disintegrates and his children grow further away from him. The more he lives and the more he learns, the less he understands. Through the vividness of his voice and his growing sense of the sorrow and absurdity of the world, Tom Ripple becomes an unusually appealing anti-hero, 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. In this remarkable debut novel, Charles Chadwick has created one of the most memorable, brilliantly realized characters in contemporary fiction. By turns poignant, funny, heartbreaking, and profound, It's All Right Now is a towering achievement and a singular work of the imagination.
| | Industry reviews | "The most remarkable thing about this extraordinary debut novel is not that the author is 72 years old; it is in the risks Chadwick...takes and brings off with astute craftsmanship and touching sincerity."
Publishers Weekly (03/14/2005)
"A sprawling saga of the English suburbs....Nothing much happens, but it does so with a world-weary elegance, full of wintry discontent. Mature, knowing, and very well done."
Kirkus (04/15/2005)
"Trivia...consumes many of Tom's musings, but Chadwick's achievement is such that Ripple's small thoughts--slight observations, petty miseries, daily regrets--come to seem worthy of center stage....Following him on his journey may require more stamina than some readers can spare, but, as in life, to reach the end is to complete a story at once ordinary and unique."
New Yorker
"Ripple's voice is so convincing you don't just know him--you are him....No writer--NO writer--has ever been more scrupulous in honoring his characters' complexity, in distinguishing who they sometimes appear to be from who they sometimes are....IT'S ALL RIGHT NOW, like its narrator, is radically original despite (and because of) its naiveté. It doesn't rethink the novel: it thinks up the novel from scratch. That's how the masters did it. And--I'll just say it--still do."
Newsweek - David Gates (06/13/2005)
"...Chadwick is up to something patently different from merely offering an English variation on the American theme of suburban ennui. Rather than present a character from the outside..., Chadwick is presenting Ripple presenting himself--with convincing transparency....[W]hen reading IT'S ALL RIGHT NOW, we have the uncommon experience that we are observing the inner workings of a real, rather than a conspicuously constructed, being....In the hands of another novelist..., this onslaught of harrowing material would be a forced death march that no reader could endure, yet Ripple's inner world blossoms on the page with writing that drives the reader onward....[T]he world within IT'S ALL RIGHT NOW [is] as warm and quick as flesh."
Harper's - Wyatt Mason (07/01/2005)
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