In the Falling Snow

August 31, 2009
Phillips (Dancing in the Dark) is a master when it comes to issues of race, immigration and identity in modern England. In his latest, protagonist Keith Gordon, the child of West Indian immigrants, is going through a mid-life crisis. Separated from his white wife, whose family cut her off for marrying him, and fielding resentment from his 17-year-old son Laurie (wrestling with the stigma of his mixed background), Keith tries to make sense of his disintegrating life-also including a career on the skids and a troubled relationship with his own father. Phillips's latest is thoughtful, personal and engrossing, detailing the struggles of second-generation immigrants, thoroughly assimilated Britons who don't "look" British. While Keith can be frustratingly passive, his personal saga is challenging and emblematic, chronicling the changing racial makeup of modern England without ever crossing into stereotypical or maudlin territory.

September 15, 2009
The head of a London office on Race Equality ends his affair with a woman he supervises, launching a schematic set of repercussions in this new novel by Phillips (Foreigners, 2007, etc.).

Keith Gordon is intelligent, articulate, even reflective, but very quickly the reader learns not to trust his judgment of his own actions and character. A black man of West Indian descent, separated for three years from the white wife he romanced at university, the 47-year-old has no clue as to the issues of power involved in his romance with a 26-year-old subordinate, or about how she might react to their breakup. Thus he's far more surprised than the reader when the relationship he considered little more than a physical release throws his own life into shambles. Testing the reader's credulity, Keith soon after attempts to seduce another young woman, a Polish immigrant whose station in society is far lower than his. Though race appears to be a primary consideration early on—from Keith's career and his wife to the white stepmother who raised him and the mistress who could pass for white—this is ultimately a novel of generations. Keith feels distant from both his son, derided by classmates as a"halfie," and his immigrant father. The plot is overdetermined, but it's hard to deny or resist the stylistic subtlety of a narrative that encompasses (sometimes on the same page) the past, the near past and the distant past from the perspective of Keith's muddled psyche. The novel builds to an extended soliloquy that offers plenty of revelation for protagonist and reader alike, as Keith and his father attempt to forge a bond after years of estrangement. Phillips' protagonist remains a mystery, though the reader will come to know him better than he knows himself.

A stylistic tour de force, suffering from a little too much thematic connecting of the dots.

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

Starred review from September 15, 2009
Phillips psychically damaged protagonist, the English son of West Indian immigrants, is trapped in a web of woe. The survivor of a cruel childhoodthe full, sad details of which are slowly revealed over the course of this melancholy, angry, farcical, and stealthily beautiful novelKeith is an executive in a not-for-profit organization devoted to fostering racial and gender equality; yet he is screwing up royally on both fronts. His job is in jeopardy, and he has destroyed his marriage to an Englishwoman who defied her bigoted father and wounded her soft-hearted mother by loving a black man. As Keith flounders, his taciturn father approaches death, and his teenage son, tagged as a halfie, runs amok. This magnetizing tale of fathers and sons, the search for home, and the forging of the self is Phillips most straightforward and intimate novel yet about the poison of racism and xenophobia, treachery and rescue, and the failure to love. A writer with a profound sense of history, Phillips does now with brio in the latest in an exceptionally lyrical and piercing body of work.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)