Bachelor father
A solitary gay man reunites with his former stepdaughter, a struggling actress, and the rest is kismet
THE FAMILY MAN
By Elinor Lipman
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 320 pp., $25
Since Elinor Lipman's is a moral universe where wrongs are righted, it seems natural - and therefore just - that the daughter whom Henry Archer lost when she was 3 should reappear. "The Family Man" of the title lost custody for no good reason: He's gay, the nonbiological parent, and times were what they were. Now she's the 29-year-old beauty who, by lucky accident, hands out smocks at the place where he gets his hair cut.
Henry's daughter, Thalia, is also a card-carrying actress who works occasionally as a stand-in. She is well-adjusted, smart, selfless, funny, someone upon whom her Wicked Witch of a mom has managed to leave no evil thumbprint. Thalia, for reasons we don't yet know, is not currently speaking to the evil Denise.
Usually it's leafy, privileged New England, but this time Lipman's world is New York's Upper West Side, where the story clips along like a jaunty cab ride from coincident to coincident. It's the pleasant, efficient pace of a book like this that says we're in an organized, knowable world governed by its writer's characteristic warmth. Since it's the affection of her characters for one another that is allowed to be the Great Determiner, who cares if this doesn't exactly resemble what might be called reality?
The name "Thalia," as Wikipedia tells us, derives from the same Greek root that gives us "to bloom," and bloom Thalia does as soon as she is reunited with her father. She and Henry, once introduced, instantly recognize one another in the way of fairy tales, where the story is always circular so no time is ever really lost.
Thalia immediately changes her last name to Archer, and wouldn't you too if you wanted to get somewhere as an actress and your thoughtless mother has cursed you twice, first by naming you in the vicinity of Zeus, then by changing your last name to one that pulses right past ugly out toward unforgivable?
Thalia Archer vs. Thalia Krouch?
And like Jane Eyre or any other favorite orphan, our girl seems both intact and self created, so this story is actually that of Henry charting his transformation from solitaire to bustling family man.
The perfect daughter reunited with the perfect dad finds him to be patient, rich, and the kind of nonpracticing lawyer who will have infinite time for her. This is the townhouse-owning dad we've all dreamed of with the three-and-a-half room maisonette downstairs that's miraculously empty so we - I mean Thalia - can move right in, no territorial mom to compete with. There's even access to the castle gained by a secret staircase by which one may enter a costume shop of clothes that belonged to Henry's mother and, of course, miraculously fit.
Thalia soon gets a long-term paying gig not so much acting as playing the pretend girlfriend of some socially clueless, horror-movie actor who is trying to rebrand himself as a species more human, less "Night of the Living Hybrids." (In the real world that we read a novel like this to avoid, what actually happens? Science will mix a packet of monkey DNA with that of, say, a jellyfish for no reason other than it can.)
The Hybrid, who has changed his name to Leif, seems so odd he might have been plucked from an artificial ficus, which is why those who are doing the repurposing of his stardom have to go to all the trouble of hiring him a girlfriend, since he doesn't seem to be able to get one the regular way.
In a Lipman novel people match, fates meet, and patience is rewarded, so the daughter who has known only sketchy guys is suddenly poised to become not only tabloid famous from her role in the production that might be called "Dating the Weird," but may have also found her heart's desire in the handsome moving man who trucked her poor sad futon up to her dad's from Chinatown.
People transform in Lipman's world, so even the flat-out mean can be redeemed. Denise makes amends by setting Henry up with the adorable Todd, who works in table linens at Gracious Home. What does Todd look like?
"Later, Henry will describe him this way to Sheri Abrams, Ph.D.: You know the short, redheaded boy in high school whose mother put creases in all his clothes? Clean-cut and very cute? Probably on the gymnastics team? Add thirty years and a few inches to the waist."
And this is Thalia learning that her father's boyfriend works in retail: "This is why [Henry] loves Thalia: Her response is backlit by an enthusiasm that even great acting talent couldn't manufacture. 'Gracious Home? Which department?' "
Lipman's characters are keenly observant. What they observe is a harmony that feels almost subversive, that things not only can turn out well, that they probably will, that life can - at least at certain moments - indeed feel charmed.
Her world view? Her enthusiasm, her effortless wit? Just a few of the reasons we love Elinor Lipman.
Jane Vandenburgh is the author of the novels "Failure to Zigzag" and "The Physics of Sunset" and the recently published memoir "A Pocket History of Sex in the 20th Century." 