A Novel Called Heritage

by Margaret Mitchell Dukore

Book by Dukore, Margaret Mitchell

276 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1982

Reviews

[Scarlett Harris · Rating 3 out of 5]

Let me tell you a funny story about this book. I love hearing about writers’ processes - what their schedules look like, how they get inspired etc. Recently I was listening to Laura Lippman talking about her latest book Dream Girl on the Writers Bone podcast, and how a novel called Heritage (she didn’t mention the author) inspired her. She said it was about a writer struggling to write a novel (it’s actually more about the writer struggling to get her novel *published*. Impostor syndrome? This protagonist doesn’t know her.), a big theme in Dream Girl and, coincidentally, a lot of the books I’ve been reading lately. I searched high and low for this novel but for the life of me I could not find it. It turns out all I needed to do was read the acknowledgements of Dream Girl itself to find that it wasn’t a novel called Heritage at all, but a novel called A Novel Called Heritage, published in 1982 and out of print. Luckily I was able to find a first edition on eBay! I’m not sure it was worth all the trouble…

[Sarah Rigg · Rating 4 out of 5]

Here's the hilarious review that 12-year-old me gave of this book in my journal from 1985:

"I read 'A Novel Called Heritage' and I thought it was really good but that all the swearing didn't add a whole lot to it."

[Bibi Rose · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a wonderful novel; hope it will be reissued.

It's another one of those books (cf. early Margaret Drabble; Rebecca Goldstein's The Mind-Body Problem) that wins you over with a fresh point of view more than with any plot point. I say a fresh point of view, but this book has been around for ages and it still stands out for me. It does have a fairly ingenious plot structure but it's more the sheer force of the narrator's personality that sustains it from page to page. The narrator talks about how unattractive to me she is: "I couldn't seduce the garbage man if I sat naked on top of the garbage can." It has a beat, and you can dance to it.