It's All Right Now: Summary and book reviews of It's All Right Now by Charles Chadwick, plus links to an excerpt from It's All Right Now and a biography of Charles Chadwick.
It's All Right Now
by Charles Chadwick
Hardcover: May 2005,
667 pages.
Paperback: Jul 2006,
704 pages.
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.
If you expect intense action in your reading matter then it would be best if you moved swiftly past It's All Right Now. However, if you've enjoyed the subtle pleasures of books such as William Boyd's Any Human Heart or John Lanchester's Mr Phillips, then you should take a close look at this one. (Reviewed by BookBrowse Review Team).
The Washington Post - Adam Mazmanian
the writing assumes a richness and even occasional majesty that it thoroughly lacks in the early pages....
Publishers Weekly
The most remarkable thing about this extraordinary debut novel is not that the author is 72 years old; it is in the risks Chadwick, a retired civil servant, takes and brings off with astute craftsmanship and touching sincerity.
Kirkus Reviews
Nothing much happens, but it does so with a world-weary elegance, full of wintry discontent. Mature, knowing and very well done.
Booklist - Joanne Wilkinson
Starred Review. This first novel written by a 72-year-old British civil servant has garnered a good deal of prepress publicity because of its author's age and the fact that it sold for six figures. The real attraction of this moving novel, however, is the purity of its vision.
Jonathan Safran Foer
This novel is huge -- in size, ambition, intelligence, and heart.
Recent Reader Reviews
Rated of 5
by Bob It's all right now What a wonderful, moving book this is. It is definitely worth buying. My friends and I all loved it.
This first
novel by 72-year-old retired
civil servant Charles Chadwick
caused quite a ripple
pre-publication as much for the
age of the author as for the
book itself. It's All
Right Now is Chadwick's
fifth novel but his first to be
published (he received nothing
but rejection slips for the
others). When Chadwick
received the news that his novel
had received advances worth
several hundred thousand dollars
he said "I am utterly astonished
- The phrase 'beyond my wildest
dreams' has now taken on meaning
for me."
His editor at Faber (UK) said,
"As a first novel it is
astonishing; as the product of a
lifetime's experience it becomes
explicable."
A moving, ambitious and richly conceived novel that summons up the heroics and follies of twentieth-century life.
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(401 words).
Jonathan Safran Foer
of 5
by Bob
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