Ask Alice

by D.J. Taylor

Glamorous Alice Keach is one of 1930s London's foremost hostesses. Despite humble American origins, she has secured her place in high society through marriage to one of England's wealthiest bachelors.But Alice has a secret. Its roots run years back, and miles away, to the dust-blasted prairies of Kansas. It corncerns a lost little boy left under the haphazard guidance of an eccentric uncle. Now, a visit from America looks set to blow apart Alice's glittering pre-eminence forever.

Genres: Historical Fiction, Fiction

352 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

David John Taylor (born 1960) is a critic, novelist and biographer. After attending school in Norwich, he read Modern History at St John's College, Oxford, and has received the 2003 Whitbread Biography Award for his life of George Orwell.

He lives in Norwich and contributes to The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, The Independent, New Statesman and The Spectator among other publications.

He is married to the novelist Rachel Hore, and together they have three sons.

Reviews

[Sarah Mac · Rating 2 out of 5]

Meh. Zzzzz. I enjoyed Mr Taylor’s KEPT, but this one isn’t doing it for me. It’s a super-slow, non-linear plot populated by uninteresting emotionless ciphers, & I really don’t care what happens to them. There comes a point where subtlety is no longer subtle—it’s just tedious & dull.

DNF @ roughly 30%.

[Jeanette · Rating 2 out of 5]

Reading this book was a test of my perseverance.
Little to no character development. What motivated Alice to do any of the things she did? Who was she, really? Why did she get off the train with a stranger? Why did she go to England? Why not stay in New York and try Broadway? Why the British stage? (I could go on and on...It turns out I still have lots of questions to ask Alice.)
There was also very little plot.
So really there was not much to this book except a lot of changing points of view and time and that got annoying. One of the major characters/points of view just all but disappeared halfway through the novel until almost the end when he (and his point of view) were suddenly re-introduced. (And there was really no surprise as to his relationship with Alice. Was that supposed to be surprising? I think it was...) There were several characters that added nothing to the story but took up big chunks of the novel. Etc etc etc. Blah blah blah.

Am I the only one who noticed the Little House locations? DeSmet. Silver Lake. Even a mention of someone named Ingells. Coincidence? Or this British authors only reference for life in the American West in the late 19th century?

[Helen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I adored this book but then I have loved all the books I've read by D J Taylor. He casts magic spells over words and turns them into breathtaking sentences and page turning novels.

This one is written in several povs, primarily Alice herself and a mysterious young man named Ralph. The novel begins in a poor farming community in USA and ends up in a courtroom in London approx 30 years later.

There is much to enjoy along the way; broken relationships, desertion, stage acting, a mad uncle who invents a new colour, money, privilege, threats and murder. A real treat undershot with wonderful humour. I really recommend this book along with Taylor's Kept and Derby Day.

[Megan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Taylor does an excellent job of setting scenes, creating atmosphere, and evoking mood with rich and beautiful language. Unfortunately, he doesn’t do much to develop characters. The people in this book are cardboard cutouts being shifted vapidly through a lush literary environment; dull people who do next to nothing. Some of the characters, moreover, are entirely superfluous, and several chapters about them go entirely nowhere and could be cut from the book with no loss. This book is like a gorgeously decorated cake that elicits ooohs and aaahs, but once sliced and eaten proves to be bland and flavorless.

[Karen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Barely 3 Stars. The story was good...just didn't care for the writing style..sometimes in 1st person, other times in 3rd person plus the first ½ of the book was back and forth in time to the point it was distracting. Then some characters would get thrown in and you wondered where they even came from. You really never do get close to the main character, Alice. She is what the book is all about but always seems to be in the background.

[Nicole Herrington · Rating 2 out of 5]

If you like books where nothing much happens until the last quarter this is the book for you. Very slow & clunky, I skimmed thru at least half the book & didn't miss out on anything.

[Marla · Rating 1 out of 5]

Boring, with an OK end.

[Julie · Rating 3 out of 5]

This story is a journey as well as a epic tale.

[Vicki · Rating 3 out of 5]

Story takes place from 1900-1930's. American orphan becomes actress in UK, marries well and ends up killing the father of her long lost son.

[Hannah · Rating 1 out of 5]

For the first time ever I didn't finish a book. I'm stubborn and always finish but this one I couldn't. Slow, hard to read, drop dead boring.

[DubaiReader · Rating 2 out of 5]

A tedious read.

I bought this book at a recent literary festival attended by D.J.Taylor and his wife Rachel Hore. She was giving a creative writing workshop and as his name never appeared under Speakers I can only assume that he was also involved with the writing class. And this was the feel the book had for me - more of a writing exercise than a novel I would read for pleasure. I felt he would have been better suited to writing short stories as there were spurts of interest along the way, but added together this novel became hard work. It took me nearly 2 weeks to read and I only finished because I had to lead the discussion at our reading group.

The central character is Alice, a teenage orphan from Kansas City, travelling to live with relatives in Bellevue. When the train breaks down en route she agrees to accompany Drouett, a salesman she had been talking to on the train, for dinner at a nearby hotel. She never re-boards the train. This sounds like a potential opening for an exciting story, but no, it is just one of many unexplained episodes in this novel. Eventually she makes her way to England by boat but we are never told why or how.
In a parallel story, that skips back and forth in time in relation to Alice's movements, we meet Ralph, also seemingly orphaned, who lives in a large mansion with servants and an elderly lady. When the lady dies he ends up with "Uncle", the brother of one of the servants, who strangely takes on the role of father to a boy he has never previously met. I'd already had enough and I was only 1/3 through the book.

Some interesting character descriptions but I lost interest in their motives well before the end, which was also an anticlimax.
Witin our book group five of us had finished this and the score out of 5 was unanimously 2 to 3.

[Meredith · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book feels like it was written to support a great title. Unfortunately the novel doesn't live up to it. It's kind of like a later re-envisioning of Lady Audley's secret, without the drama or tension. No clue really as to what is going on in this woman's mind regarding the major decisions that affect her whole life course. Normally I'm not too bothered about lack of explanations of psychology, but we are told why she makes certain relatively minor decisions and what she is thinking then, just not what she's thinking at HUGE key points.

There is material for a whole life for Alice (or a whole book) at each stage here....Kansas, De Smet (yes I found the LIW connection odd---if there's no significance or connection why not use somewhere else?), mission life in a big city, life as an actress touring in England and London, life as a society hostess...it feels like a fast journey with nothing learned about Alice who apparently also learns nothing on the way. It all seems a bit pointless. None of the characters introduced really show what they are thinking, feeling, learning. Nor is any moral or purpose introduced by the narrator. The title and the story feel dissonant as well. Ask Alice....what? She doesn't seem to have any answers to give us.....the Jefferson Airplane quote "Go ask Alice--I think she'll know." is an odd one to apply to this woman. No answers from her about herself or anyone else. No Alice-in-Wonderland connection either. Why is this title used????

Is this enjoyable? Stimulating? Interesting? Fascinating? Satisfying? No.

Is it well written? Perhaps, because that might be the only explanation as to why I read it to the end.

[Stephanie · Rating 4 out of 5]

The more I ruminate on Ask Alice, by D.J. Taylor, the more I like it. The book is meandering yet suspenseful, deliberately paced but a relatively fast read. It tells the stories of Alice, an extraordinarily cool customer who never fails to grab what Fate is offering her, and of Ralph, a young man ignorant of his parentage, reared by his adoptive uncle, a tinkering-in-his-garage-scientist type whose discovery of a new color (of all things!) makes him enough money to thrust him and Ralph into quite high society. All of Mr. Taylor's characters are very honest with themselves, while not necessarily so with others, which makes for a very good read. My quarrel with the book is that since Mr. Taylor is so good at drawing his characters, I wish that I knew more of some of the peripheral actors that cross his stage. I liked Mr. Taylor's prose; he was able to speak volumes with a few lines of dialogue or a brief descriptive passage.

[Al · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found this book to be somewhat short on plot, while dwelling too often and too long on the motivations of some of the major characters -- except, that is, Alice herself, about whom we learn surprisingly little as she careens from misadventure to misadventure, somehow always landing on her feet. Finally she emerges as a wealthy English widow, after a successful, albeit improbable, career as an English actress. Despite all the careful explanations of her state of mind at the end of the book, one must question the conclusion. At the same time, what to make of the Tono Bungay-like subplot involving the young man and his "uncle?" Maybe there are depths here that I just didn't plumb, but unless you really want to experience life in the early twentieth century, particularly English theater and industry, don't bother.

[Jennifer · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was a very frustrating book...we never learn why Alice is being sent to live with a different set of relatives, we have no insight as to why she leaves the train with a man she has just met, or why she does many of the things she does. I kept thinking she met the definition of sociopath. We are presented no framework or justification of her amoral behavior and only the briefest glimpse into her thought processes. The portions of the book narrated by Ralph weren't much better...they seemed largely like a rumination on social change in England between the two world wars and the superficiality of the upper class. I spent the entire book puzzled by these people, not liking any of them. I'm not even sure why I kept reading.

[Jennifer · Rating 2 out of 5]

This novel follows Alice, a beautiful young American woman, who tries to outrun a serious mistake by fleeing to England, where she becomes a famous actress. By the 1920s she is a wealthy widow and sought-after society hostess. Halfway through the book I began having odd moments of deja-vu: haven't I read about this scandalous party before? Didn't someone jump into a fountain in a fancy-dress costume just like this in some other book? Turns out that last year I read the non-fiction "Bright Young People: The Rise and Fall of a Generation" by the same author, and which covered some of the same ground. Nice recycling, but it didn't endear me to either book.

[Bibliophile · Rating 2 out of 5]

Nicely atmospheric, though Taylor's Americans sound like English people for the most part (I'm fairly certain that a Midwestern salesman like Drouett wouldn't refer to vacuuming as "Hoovering" or to his luggage as his "cases") but ultimately, this novel didn't go anywhere at all. I guessed the big connection between two principle characters on about page 50 and then I waited for them to catch up, and I wasn't interested enough in the book's characters to actually care about their vicissitudes. Kept, by the same author, was a much more engaging work.

[Fiona Van · Rating 3 out of 5]

I quite liked this book. It is an interesting period piece, about a poor woman from Kansas who becomes a society hostess in London in the twenties, with aristocratic and political contacts and even a friendship with the Prince of Wales. However, it is unsatisfying because you never have any understanding of WHY she walked away from not one but two families and groups of friends. Someone asks her to get off a train with him, and she says "Yes".

[Carol · Rating 1 out of 5]

The book sounded interesting but after a few chapters, Alice's personality if she actually had any was not developing to any degree. I gave her the benefit of the doubt for several more pages but she just continued to drift along aimlessly and pointlessly. I lost any interest in continuing and drifted off as well. I too would have several questions to Ask Alice but as there are better books waiting to be read, why bother?

[Kristina · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book definitely does not fit into my typical genre-but it kept me reading. The story is written from several pov which makes this book a more reader responsible one in that the reader must keep track of what is going on from the author's clues. The ending will surprise you so look forward to it!

[Shannon · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is another book that I should like but I just cant get into. I haven't even finished it (I am half way through chapter 18) so I am going to put it aside for now. I will try to go back to it at a later date and hopefully I will be able to change my rating. I like to give books a second chance.

[Sue · Rating 1 out of 5]

I did not like this book, I found it very hard to read and totally uninteresting.

[Lynn · Rating 1 out of 5]

I revisited this one for a book challenge and it definitely was a challenge to finish. The general story was good but I had a hard time with the writing.

[Leah · Rating 3 out of 5]

Quite nicely written, but little plot and fewer surprises than I expected.

[Cynthia Scott · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very intriguing story and cleverly arranged.

[Wendopolis · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book started out so well, and then couldn't sustain it, due mostly because of the ever changing POVs.

[Anita · Rating 2 out of 5]

meh

[Nicola Greer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Prwtty tame and cliched, not too difficult to unravel. I thought it got bogged down towards the end, and the climax of the story and the court case reporting was rushed and boring

[Rose · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good characters. The opening reminded me of Edna Ferber's novels, which means a very successful capturing of the style of the novel's time.

[Masha · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book.
Style is very good. I would give it 4 and half stars!
The characters were well drawn and the plot was good.
I found the ending a bit anticlimactic.