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.’
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