Goodness

by Tim Parks

George Crawley has finally got his life running along satisfyingly straight lines. Having made a success of his career and saved his faltering marriage, he is secure in the belief that he is master of his own destiny. Then comes the tragic blow - fate presents him with an apparently insoluble problem. Except that the word 'insoluble' just isn't part of the man's vocabulary. George will stop at nothing, nothing, to get his life back on the rails again.

Genres: Fiction

352 pages, Paperback

Published January 21, 1994

About the author

Born in Manchester in 1954, Tim Parks grew up in London and studied at Cambridge and Harvard. In 1981 he moved to Italy where he has lived ever since, raising a family of three children. He has written fourteen novels including Europa (shortlisted for the Booker prize), Destiny, Cleaver, and most recently In Extremis.
During the nineties he wrote two, personal and highly popular accounts of his life in northern Italy, Italian Neighbours and An Italian Education. These were complemented in 2002 by A Season with Verona, a grand overview of Italian life as seen through the passion of football. Other non-fiction works include a history of the Medici bank in 15th century Florence, Medici Money and a memoir on health, illness and meditation, Teach Us to Sit Still. In 2013 Tim published his most recent non-fiction work on Italy, Italian Ways, on and off the rails from Milan to Palermo.
Aside from his own writing, Tim has translated works by Moravia, Calvino, Calasso, Machiavelli and Leopardi; his critical book, Translating Style is considered a classic in its field. He is presently working on a translation of Cesare Pavese's masterpiece, The Moon and the Bonfires.
A regular contributor to the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books, his many essays are collected in Hell and Back, The Fighter, A Literary Tour of Italy, and Life and Work.
Over the last five years he has been publishing a series of blogs on writing, reading, translation and the like in the New York Review online. These have recently been collected in Where I am Reading From and Pen in Hand.

Reviews

[Orma · Rating 3 out of 5]

Letto in una sera.
Terribile. E splendido.

[R.Bharat · Rating 3 out of 5]

Today i completed ''Goodness '' by Tim parks , which explores, as its eponymous title indicates the realm of what constitutes goodness. George crawley begins the novel with an account of his father's death in Burundi as a missionary and his mother's utterance or disavowal or renouncing of faith that would secure her life and her children's, something whose nature is undiscerned but which persists as a haunting reminder to his mother of the unknown/the irreligious as an apprehension. ''Goodness' delineates George's contradictory working with his family dynamics, first as a questioning, sceptical rationalist adolescent in a house where his mother's religious piety, his sister peggy's affirmative faith and undirected freebooting life and his grandfather's brutal commonsensical ''coarseness ' . After this brief beginning the novel begins with a chapter titled ''A bundle of contradictions''
.
Which , in a way , encapsulates the novel and George's trajectory which is less a linear progress than a complicated traversing of complexities both deeply embedded in him and yet questioned, in which the very manner and texture of the questioning and its impingement on life forms a dramatic impetus . Because his rationalism or modern sensibility emerges by measuring himself against his family's personalities it remains partly reactive and partly shaped by the milieu of the sixties to eighties in the uk. Prizing bourgeoisie bulwarks of safety by marrying Shirley, above him in class ,George's complacence is upended by the birth of a severely disabled daughter Hilary . After Hilary's birth George's reason founders, seeking a foothold from the very compendium of contradictory forces that jostle in him, precipitating the need to embrace faith or a surgery whose benefits aren't fully guaranteed . Where his wife and pietistic mother find refuge in fatalistic acceptance , alongside rigorous care giving , george attempts a radical denouement which wrenches from him an ironic act of goodness that is less an act of will than a blind response to the crisis he manufactures and cannot implement on his own terms. Because one inhabits george's roiling mind one sees things filtered through his tormented peregrination through life forces as well as inward perturbations that outstrip his grasp and control.

''Goodness' ends up as a somewhat ambiguous novel and its rather shocking ending gives a paradoxical twist. Internalized goodness that exhorts and exacts unstinting, often unrewarding toil, embodied in his mother, but undertaken cheerfully contrasts with the more rationalized, intellectual battering at the moral thicket of human density. And both these forces are seen as being incompensatory yet carrying their own slivers of perspicuity. Ultimately ''goodness '' is more an exploration of the dynamics of goodness and their unresolved constituents than a simple affirmation/negation . That constitutes its strength as a novel even as there are elements of George's own psychodrama, and his incessant fascination with his interiority that has aspects of the schematic or the implausibly impersonal. But within the terms of the novel it works intelligently. The problems of raising a disabled child are not sentimentalized or disavowed.

In Destiny the narrator's son's suicide functions as a question mark that is the substratum of his tortuous headspace , in Dreams of rivers and seas forms of healing that aren't strictly medical, western are navigated without definitive conclusiveness , in ''in extremis'' the narrator deals with the schizophrenia of his friend's son as he attends to his dying mother in a hospice. ''Goodness '' is an early Tim parks novel and it strikes a questing, sardonic look at questions - not in their overlapping layers of inwrought entanglement but with a welcome deepening misgiving that would become maturer and braver in subsequent novels.

[Cabbie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I would never be gratuitously mean or violent, [-] but then nor would I ever put up with anybody or any situation that made life unbearable [-]. I would be honest and reasonable, generous where generosity was due, and I would always always choose the road that led to a happy, healthy, normal life.

So says George Crawley, whose missionary father had been murdered for his faith. In Tim Parks's Goodness, George and his sister Peggy return home with their mother, whose "one thing I regret in my life is the words they made me speak" before they killed her husband.

George narrates his story in two parts: Before Hilary, and Hilary. In the first half he looks back on his childhood and early married life, when he firmly stuck to his own moral code. He is quite a dislikable character, self-centred and unable to empathise with others, convinced he knows best, and blaming his own problems on the faith-based ethics of others.

He's disappointed that his mother "could never marry a man who had broken a solemn vow to someone else," thus depriving her son of a new father. He believes his sister Peggy, unmarried and pregnant, was "erring in sentimentality and romanticism," and "refusing to look long and hard at future reality, future practicality," in happily refusing an abortion. He never quite understands his wife Shirley, never asks the right questions because they might elicit the wrong answers for him and his chosen way of life.

In the second half of the book we see George in a different light, his life turned on its head with the birth of his severely disabled daughter Hilary. He struggles against the hand that life has dealt him, whereas his mother, wife and sister just "get on with things, that's life."

A dislikable protagonist is not a barrier to a good book, and just as Barbara Covett in What Was She Thinking? Notes on a Scandal was fascinating in her dislikability, so is George Crawley. The ending didn't suit me, but that's a personal preference and won't stop me reading more of Tim Parks's stories.

[Stephen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Parks has a penchant for novels that tread a line between murder and manslaughter (actual or imagined). The perpetrators and their jostling psychologies are held disturbingly close, testing our readerly levels of Stockholm Syndrome. On his own site, Parks says he was particularly gratified by a review in the 'Daily Mail' (itself a spinner of dark fictions) that 'Goodness' was both brutal and beautiful. You have to look hard for the beauty but the brutal is here in ash-smeared spades.

George is a truly unlikeable monster: a product of Thatcherite yuppidom, of societiless each-man-for-himself internalised one-upmanship, of repudiated lower middle-class beginnings. Being stuck in his head there are moments of enjoyably uncomfortable reckoning, where the reader may recognise a certain cognitive dissonance. A sincerely returned smile born of affection, for instance, might jostle at cross-purposes with a meditation on planned harm to the recipient. The scale of these plans, though, are repeatedly so large that it feels like being hostage to a psychopathic abuser.

On the evening I started this book, I also watched 'The Child in Time' by Ian McEwan (made 2017 with Benedict Cumberbach). In one of those occasional and arresting coincidences, I straight after found a reference to what is almost certainly the same McEwan book in 'Goodness'. Unforeseen tragedies with an only child propel both McEwan's and Parks's novels, in turn testing their young upwardly mobile 1980s couples to breaking point. Bitter brews simmered in tears, neither makes comfortable reading. It's possibly unfair to contrast, but McEwan's borders on greatness, whereas Parks's competently nauseates.

I think it's a better book than 'Loving Roger', while for that matter I might put it on a par with McEwan's earlier, critically-acclaimed but just-not-for-me, 'The Kindness of Strangers' (1981). Novels that carry through dark themes to the most impassable places have their place, but like a painting wrought in just blacks and dark navies, I found 'Goodness' unremittingly lacking in tonality.

The test of a good novel for me is how insistently I might want to recommend it to someone I know. It can be a people pleaser I'd give to everyone, or a tricky customer I'd pass on sparingly. Friends can rest assured that my copy of 'Goodness' will be going to a charity shop.

[Eddie Docherty · Rating 2 out of 5]

I got to the end of this novel but didn't think I'd manage it after the first 50 pages or so. The character of George seemed one-dimensional (and he's horrible). Having finished it, I thought it was ok but nothing special. A twist at the end and a possible epiphany but it was unsatisfying.

[Misha Herwin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm not sure how to describe this book. It is supposed to be funny and it didn't work like that for me. I didn't like the main character but his moral dilemma was one I could empathise with. An interesting but far from entertaining book.

[Barbie Queenie · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this many years ago, so this is a re-read. I'd forgotten the story pretty much entirely: the selfish, arrogant main character, George; his family, seen in every respect by him as awful; his wife whom he loves dearly and so on. Parks writes from the point of view of George throughout and we share in his worst and best thoughts, many of which are honest even when vile.
Brilliantly written, even though the story itself has some horrendous moments.

[Hilary · Rating 5 out of 5]

Marvellous. Tim Parks has a gift for skewering the dynamics of a relationship, for expressing unflinchingly what we often really feel (but don't say!). This exceptional novel deals with the fraught issue of parenting a severely handicapped child.

[Lynne Cosmano · Rating 1 out of 5]

this was the first novel by this author I've read and I was surprised at how much I disliked it. May read another to see what I think. Really like his stories of life in Italy but this fiction was grim with unlikable characters.

[Leslie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Humorous, sad, and ironic. A story of a couple who have a severly handicapped child and how they cope or don't cope. A bit odd.