Family Comedy : "The Altruists" by Andrew Ridker

Charity begins at home... A review of Andrew Ridker's "The Altruists"

I do not envy comic novelists.  Besides the challenges facing any novel writer, they have to elicit a smile, chuckle or smirk from their readers at regular intervals.  Then, if and when they get it right, they face the risk of seeing their work dismissed as ‘(s)light’ fare.  A case in point, in my opinion, was Andrew Sean Greer’s Less, which I greatly enjoyed and which I think really did deserve the Pulitzer, but which was slated in some quarters, including by friends and reviewers whose opinion I greatly respect.

It is therefore great news that a fresh talent has now joined the ranks of comic novelists.  Andrew Ridker was born in 1991, and his debut novel The Altruists is published later this year. Admittedly, on the cynicism/bleakness scale, this novel is closer to Richard Ford than to Andrew Sean Greer, which might make it more palatable to the literati.   Indeed, it’s already attracting glowing advance reviews.  As for me, I admired most of it, although I find it harder to actually like it.

The protagonists of The Altruists are the Alters, a Jewish middle-class family  from St Louis.  The mother, Francine, haunts the novel, despite being dead for most of it. Indeed, it is her inheritance which serves as the catalyst of the plot.  Incensed at the fact that her sixty-something professor husband Arthur has taken up a much younger lover whilst she is dying of cancer, Francine bequeaths a secret fortune to her two children, Ethan and Maggie.  Faced with the prospect of losing his girlfriend and also his heavily mortgaged house, Arthur invites his children back to St Louis for a reconciliatory weekend, hoping to convince them to bail him out.  But Ethan and Maggie have their own problems.  Ethan (whose homosexuality Arthur has never quite accepted) is out of a job, and is now living off his mother’s money in Brooklyn, whilst trying to sort out his messy love life.  On her part, Maggie is a hard-headed would-be altruist, whose obsession with causes and ideals often leads her to actually overlook the needs of the people who surround her. Although Arthur’s plans seem to be failing miserably (but quite entertainingly for us readers), they do lead the Alters to come to term with their history and to understand that they are possible more like each other than they like to think.

To be honest, I found it hard to symphatize with any of the characters, who seemed to have few, if any, redeeming features.  There are likeable rogues, but Arthur is certainly not one of them.  And his children are, frankly, chips off the old block.  This ultimately detracted from my enjoyment of the novel.  At the same time, however, there is much that is brilliant about The Altruists – it is an undeniably insightful work, it has some crisply humourous dialogue, and memorable set pieces.  I particularly enjoyed the final showdown between the Alters and Arthur’s young lover, and the Zimbabwe episode feels like something out of Evelyn Waugh.     

Hardcover, 320 pages

Expected publication: March 7th 2019 by Jonathan Cape