Richard's Things

by Frederic Raphael

Kate married straight from university, unselfconsciously beautiful, her life turned in, concentrated on her happy marriage, her world complete, not needing examination.Then suddenly she is widowed, her husband Richard dead of a heart attack whilst away on business.Marie-José just a girl really. The girl who was with Richard when he died, who drove him to the hospital, left discreetly.Both are Richard's things, his relics. Each is incomplete without him, each drawn in her anguish to the other by the need to understand him. And each drawn physically to the other in their need for comfort.

Genres: Fiction

208 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 1973

About the author

Writer, critic and broadcaster, Frederic Raphael was educated at Charterhouse School and at St John's College, Cambridge. He has written several screenplays and fifteen novels. His The Glittering Prizes was one of the major British and American television successes of the 1970s.

Reviews

[Alex Sarll]

A man's wife and his mistress meet when he dies, and begin an affair of their own; you could say that's a very me plot, which would not be entirely untrue so long as you bear in mind it's in the sense of being a perfect tragedy, what with him necessarily missing it. On top of which, the poor bastard was younger than me. I'd interpreted the blurb such that he'd at least be 50-odd, which against all numerical evidence I still think of as a good way away, but no. Still, swings and roundabouts; he may have his own successful landscaping business, but he is also, you know, dead. Also, and worst of all, this is the mildest spoiler imaginable, but all does not go well for the two women. I suppose if it had, the novel wouldn't have been able to pass for literary. As is, it's a strange beast; a fine example of why I don't customarily rate books, because I genuinely don't know whether it was any good. Part of me thinks of it as a little like Iris Murdoch without the magic, with the interiority not on display in the same way, and a cast who are far more plausible and as such much less interesting. But of course there were huge swathes of this middle-class adultery fiction about in the mid-to-late 20th century, it's just that most of the rest of it I never have nor will read. It's a world just before and just upscale from one I once knew, where people idly remember the first windscreen wiper they saw, and houses go for "as much as thirty-two grand". I will say this much for it: I love that, at least in the edition I have, the first kiss is on page 69.

[Gillian · Rating 1 out of 5]

Despite its apparent enthusiastic reception, the strange linguistic style irritated me intensely. Maybe it improved after the first third but this book has now joined the 'donate to charity' pile.