This author won the orange Prize for her novel, Bel Canto – a book I tried half-a-dozen times to read but just couldn’t get into. For that reason, I wasn’t exactly champing at the bit to read this either. I kept spying it at the top of my pile of books and thinking – I don’t much like the look of you, no matter what The New York Times says.
However, I mistakenly threw the book in my overnight bag one weekend when I was going away and so we were stuck with each other. Grumpily, I opened the cover to read the first line: “Bernadette had been dead two weeks when her sisters showed up in the Doyle’s living room asking for the statue back.” Just like that, it had me.
Widower Bernard Doyle is the former mayor of Boston, the biological father of bad-boy-with-a-heart-of-gold Sullivan and the adoptive father of African-American brothers Tip and Teddy. one snowy night, Tip is pushed out of the way of an oncoming car by a stranger, a woman who it turns out didn’t just happen to be passing: she is the boys’ birth mother and has been covertly stalking them for years.
As Tip and Teddy’s newfound birth mum languishes in hospital, the Doyles try to decide what to do with her 11-year-old daughter, Kenya, who is the runner of the title.
In an interview, Ann Patchett says the book is about politics: Doyle certainly has political aspirations for his sons, which is why Tip ends up on the bumper of an oncoming car in the first place. But I thought it was more about families: What makes them tick, how they operate under pressure, and what is a family anyway?
The whole story, apart from the first chapter and the last, takes place over a single snowy Boston day and night and offers the sort of under-the-microscope view of a single household that I so enjoy.
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