Past Imperfect

August 31, 2009
A middle-aged Londoner is forced to revisit his past in Fellowes's slick and dexterous second novel (after the bestselling Snobs). Former friend Damian Baxter, after 40 years of estrangement, convinces the unnamed narrator to locate the woman Damian believes to have borne his child in 1968. As the narrator looks back on the events of that fateful summer, Fellowes exercises his considerable talent for observing the nuances of custom and class distinction. Especially interesting are the frequent digressions to consider the peculiar juncture of their "safe little, nearly-pre-1939 world" with the Swinging Sixties. In the narrator's circle of friends-who would fit comfortably into a Trollope novel-the ossified conventions of the upper class still hold sway, yet the '60s make an appearance as well, enlivening a debutante party with surprise hash brownies. We quickly discover that middle-class Damian (a "social mountaineer") managed to insinuate himself into this smart set until a terrible scene tears apart the group of friends. Deservedly compared to Tom Wolfe, Fellowes, with his ability to document the aristocracy with a sociologist's eye, fashions intriguing narratives.

July 15, 2009
Dying tycoon entreats sworn enemy to find his heir in a sophisticated meditation on the British upper crust by Fellowes (Snobs, 2005).

Constructed as a minor mystery but sprawling over the course of several decades, the novel launches with a visit by the unnamed narrator to his longtime nemesis, who is dying of pancreatic cancer. Billionaire mogul Damien Baxter shares an anonymous letter written in 1990 that reads in part,"It is also late and I am drunk and so I have found the nerve to say that you have made my life a living lie for nineteen years. I stare at my living lie each day and all because of you." The letter implies that Baxter, long sterile from adult mumps, has an offspring to whom he could leave his fortune. The newly minted detective agrees to be Baxter's inside man and access the lofty social circles necessary to track down five potential mothers: the poised daughter of an earl, a Moravian princess and a brassy American adventuress from Cincinnati, among others. Taking stock of the various candidates, the narrator pieces together Baxter's story and discerns more about his place in a society to which he barely belongs. The whodunit element is solid enough, the dialogue characteristically erudite and the pastoral milieu likely to appeal to anglophiles and Englishmen of a certain age. But Fellowes bogs down his narrative in a quagmire of minutiae about the dcor of English country houses, the social graces of a long-gone age and other period niceties that become increasingly dull as they pile up. The appeal of this overly detailed social history is likely to be lost on the average reader.

Lopsided, rambling and fitfully witty.

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July 15, 2009
In his second novel (after "Snobs"), Oscar-winning screenwriter Fellowes (e.g., "Gosford Park") examines the lives of the debutantes and young aristocrats of 1960s England 40 years on. Damian Baxter is a self-made millionaire dying of cancer who for nearly 20 years has had in his possession an anonymous letter indicating that he fathered a child in the early 1970s, right around the time that his group of friends and lovers were breaking up and moving on, often to more unsatisfying lives. Wishing to leave his entire fortune to this child, Baxter asks his one-time friend, the novel's narrator, to visit each of the women who might have written the letter. The narrator's visits and flashbacks to their glory days make up the bulk of the novel. VERDICT While the American woman is a sad caricature, the rest of Fellowes's players more than hold one's attention and sympathy. An interesting reflection on how to cope (or in some cases, how not to cope) with the end of one's era. Recommended. [See Prepub Alert, "LJ" 5/15/09.]Julie Elliott, Indiana Univ. Lib., South Bend

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