Andrew Ridker’s The Altruists (Viking, £20) is a Jewish family saga of academic parents and grown-up offspring. From this rather careworn material he manages to wring a spry comedy of parental failure and romantic misadventure.
Arthur Alter is a terrible father, an ‘emotional cheapskate’ who attempts to bring his estranged children Ethan and Maggie together for a weekend in St Louis, with the ulterior motive of getting his hands on their inheritance. Unsurprisingly, he was excluded from his wife’s will, as he was sleeping with a much younger German medievalist throughout her final illness.
The novel takes us on grimly entertaining excursions into the parents’ back-stories; but the main focus is on the Franzenian showdown in St Louis, a ‘low-rent city abandoned by history and held together with staples and glue’. The ending is a finely written scene of family confrontation, during which Arthur admits to what his children have known all along: ‘I have been needy, reckless, and vain… neglectful and self-centred.’ This is a smart, knowing, tender first novel, full of immaculate comic timing and loquacious chutzpah.
Isabella Hammad’s epic The Parisian (Cape, £14.99) comes with praise from Zadie Smith, who proclaims the author an ‘enormous talent’. It’s a lot to live up to, and by and large Hammad delivers. This is the tale of Midhat Kamal, a young medical student from Nablus who, in 1915, travels from Alexandria to study in Montpellier. There he falls in love with his hosts’ daughter, Jeanette. It’s not long before he leaves the household in disgrace and moves to Paris — and the Sorbonne — before finally returning to Palestine, where he works for his father and is drawn to the oud-playing Fatima. They marry and eventually have four children.
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