Our Father - Hardcover

'S MOST FOCUSED, DARING, AND POWERFUL NOVEL."
--New Woman
Famed presidential advisor Stephen Upton has suffered a stroke, and his four very different daughters gather in his perfectly appointed mansion outside Boston to await his death or recovery. Elizabeth, cold and calculating, fights hard for every success and pays a high price; beautiful Mary has always needed a man to support her tastes, but time is catching up with her; Alex can't remember her childhood and wants to know why; and Ronnie, illegitimate and proud, refuses to acknowledge her feelings for the man they all love and hate. In the weeks to come, they will learn one another's terrible secrets, and the astonishing truth about the life they might have shared....
Once again, Marilyn French has written an extraordinary novel of our times--a novel of family love and resentment, of sisterhood and fatherhood, of acceptance and rejection and the search for peace.
"SHOULD STRIKE A CHORD WITH EVERY WOMAN who is wi

More quasi-feminist Sturm und Drang from a certified mistress of the genre (Her Mother's Daughter, 1987, etc.), this featuring four grown half-sisters reunited to care for the elderly father who cheerfully abused but failed to love them. Take one Frigid Intellectual (Elizabeth, a 50-something assistant secretary of the treasury); one Dizzy Socialite (Mary, a simpering, middle-aged divorc‚e); one Middle-Class Housewife (Alex, an empty-nester who longs to commune with God); and one Young Woman of Color (Ronnie, grad student and illegitimate daughter of her father's maid), mix them together, and you have one Total Woman for the 90's. French, however, seeks drama in keeping her stereotypes separate but closeted together and letting them bicker for several hundred pages. The four females, having been raised separately by different mothers, meet at the mansion of their elderly father- -Quintessential White Guy Stephen Upton, a mover and shaker in Republican circles and an entertainer of presidents and kings--to decide on his future care in the wake of a debilitating stroke. While Upton languishes in the hospital, the half-sisters occupy his mansion outside Boston, fencing warily with one another at first, then tentatively comparing notes and learning, to their own amazement, if not the reader's, that they were each in turn raped, terrorized, and otherwise tormented by their supposedly refined father. As Upton returns for in-home care, these silly sisters, who've moved from entertaining spiteful thoughts of one another (``She's good looking but getting fat,'' ``Ditzy little housewife,'' etc.) to bursting into frequent tears and embracing on a moment's notice, decide to put their monster-father through a secret trial. The expression of their long-suppressed rage will make them rich beyond all expectation--and the ultimate survivors. A book that begins with ``Women can hurt you just as much as men!'' and ends with ``My father's mansion, my prison. Go, Ronnie'' has little to offer in the way of fresh ideas. A musty, messy fairy tale with plenty of passion but no style. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.