We Had It So Good

by Linda Grant

A generational novel which opens memorably in a fur storage house in Los Angeles with its American protagonist as a boy trying on Marilyn Monroe’s coat. When he grows up, Stephen goes to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, and stays on to avoid the draft and Vietnam. He marries an Englishwoman, and they experience many of the things the baby boomer generation went through. Later the torch is passed to their children. In addition, Stephen’s father Si makes a dramatic reappearance after Stephen’s mother dies. This is a big, capacious novel, bursting with wonderful characters and ideas.

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Literature, Contemporary, Book Club, Literary Fiction, Novels

325 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2010

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads' database with this name. See this thread for more information.

Linda Grant was born in Liverpool on 15 February 1951, the child of Russian and Polish Jewish immigrants. She was educated at the Belvedere School (GDST), read English at the University of York, completed an M.A. in English at MacMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario and did further post-graduate studies at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada, where she lived from 1977 to 1984.

In 1985 she returned to Britain and became a journalist. From 1995 to 2000 she was a feature writer for the Guardian, where between 1997 and 1998 she also had a weekly column in G2. She contributed regularly to the Weekend section on subjects including the background to the use of drug Ecstasy (for which she was shortlisted for the UK Press Gazette Feature Writer of the Year Award in 1996), body modification, racism against Romanies in the Czech Republic, her own journey to Jewish Poland and to her father's birthplace and during the Kosovo War, an examination of the background to Serb nationalism.

Reviews

[switterbug (Betsey) · Rating 5 out of 5]

The sixties generation broke free of the duty-bound rigors of their Depression era parents and the social constraints of materialism, creating a counterculture of hippies dedicated to revolutionary change. As a secular Jewish middle-aged baby boomer, I can well relate to Linda Grant's portraiture of aging boomers that once embraced the youth and change and idealism of a new and outrageous culture of acid rock music, heady hallucinogens, diversity, and sexual freedoms.

Grant is the British author of Orange prize-winning When I Lived in Modern Times (2000), about a displaced London Jew who heads for Palestine, and The Clothes On Their Backs (2008), about a daughter of Jewish immigrants, which was short-listed for the Booker prize. Moreover, Grant is an award-winning journalist who closely observes the effect of a social climate on its inhabitants. In her latest novel, she creates an atmospheric arc that extends from the radical sixties and moves through historical landmarks and landmines such as Bosnia, 9/11, 7/7, and the Internet.

The novel succeeds with sublime precision, avoiding soapboxing and sentimental ruts. Its power arises partly from the narrative form that deepens with the accretion of detail and the passage of years. Chapters alternate with multiple viewpoints of various characters, but don't expect an equal distribution or conventional symmetry of voices. Grant intentionally changes tenses and perspectives throughout, sporadically keeping us in the dark about who is talking. The dissonant intervals bear close attention, which heighten the reading experience, so it appears that the author had a purpose in her contract with the reader. There was something Stravinsky-like about its force, pushing the boundaries of convention with its provocative rhythm and unpredictable turns.

The first half of the novel lacks a visible anchor. It roams forward at a slight remove, but there's an assured and poised undercurrent that keeps the reader trusting the author. There isn't a lot of plot action in this multigenerational epic; the big events are a background for the more interstitial tale of people that revolted against their parents' ideals and desperately sought self-realization, while grappling with apathy and complacency and the succor or rancor of their childhoods.

Stephen Newman, the central character, a high-strung hypochondriac and secular Jew from California, born in 1946, is the son of a Polish Jewish immigrant and a Cuban refugee mother. He meets a trio of intellectual hippies while studying science at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar in 1968, and they all become lifelong friends. After some unexpected downturns, he marries one of them, the Pre-Raphaelite looking Andrea, in order to avoid the Vietnam draft, and finds love and contentment in Islington, carving out a dignified career making documentaries for the BBC and raising their two children.

Andrea, an intuitive offbeat beauty with crooked teeth and luxuriant, tawny hair, finds her niche as a psychotherapist. Her best friend, Grace, the astonishing beauty with a plump trust fund and deep psychic wounds, is a rebel even for the sixties, and globe-trots from one country to another with her pent-up rage and hand-made clothes. Ivan becomes a successful investor and godfather to the Newman's children, Marianne and Max.

So what happens here? Is this a cautionary tale, homage to the sixties, a character study of self-realization against a backdrop of social change? Grant illuminates the often frustrating dissatisfaction of ideals--how time eradicates the hope and potential of a generation that hung onto the promise of youth.

"How can I be fifty, he asked himself, when I only just began?" Stephen had it so good--or did he? His free-floating anxiety about the choices he has made and the promises to himself he didn't fulfill careen like a bad twitch through his soul. Theirs was the generation of eternal youth, and that was their privilege. They were supposed to be exceptional, not settled into routine.

As the story unfolds and expands to include three generations, the novel becomes a map and a mirror of the human condition, of each generation's desire to break out of the mold of their parents and embark on a trajectory of trail-blazing success, or maybe just to become invisible. The metaphor of illusion is brilliantly summoned in the chosen professions of Max and Marianne.

Beyond the current, quick pace of everyday life in the millennium and a tendency to conclude, respond, and move on with instantaneous speed and recovery, this is a rare book that will germinate in the mind of the observant reader after the closing pages. Its esteem rises with each passing day of reflection. Like the lush and dense gardens that bloom between its pages, this story grows as it is tended and cared for with time and patience. What is apparent at first becomes a portal to more, and continues to nurture the hearkened soul of the dedicated reader.

"...no one wants to open the doors of perception anymore, acid was about revelation, about the vision of what lies beyond the rim of the knowable, it's a drug for revolutionaries, and they have no interest in revolution. And the other thing...it takes up so much bloody time, eight hours minimum and then a day or two to recover. If I had to market it I'd aim the product exclusively at retirees."

[Felicity · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book gets five stars because it moved me to tears. Very few authors possess the capacity and the skill to do that--to create a world in your imagination that enables you to become so attached to the characters about which they are writing that you gasp (as I did) and burst into tears when those characters are gone. Having said that, it's not immediately obvious this is a five-star book. It kind of snuck up on me, with at least a few of the characters oscillating between mildly annoying and intensely irritating. But that is part of Linda Grant's skill. The portraits of Stephen, Andrea, Grace, and Ivan are so finely sketched that I cannot help but admire the language in which their lives are crafted, if not the life each character lives. It's perhaps a little reminiscent of Phillip Hensher's "The Northern Clemency," although not as long. It's one of the those sprawling British generational sagas, even if the story begins with an American who arrives in England as a Rhodes Scholar with an Afro. He uses his scholarship to learn how to make LSD in the university's science lab, but is kicked out of Oxford for defacing a book, namely ripping the pages out of the science book that told him how to make LSD. Have I whetted your appetite yet?

[Teresa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved The Clothes on Their Backs by Linda Grant and eagerly anticipated her latest novel, a tale of the "baby boomer" generation who indeed "had it so good" and perhaps did not appreciate their good fortune.

The novel is first and foremost character driven, covering 40 years in the lives of first generation American, Stephen Newman, his English wife, Andrea, their family and friends. Stephen, son of a Polish-Jewish immigrant father and a Cuban mother, manages to dodge the draft thanks to a Rhodes Scholarship during which he meets and marries Andrea, a pleasant English girl with bad teeth. It is initially a marriage of convenience as he avoids the horrors of war but they settle into each other despite Stephen's occasional pangs for American life. Somehow, despite little effort on his part, they land on their feet, having fully enjoyed the benefits of free university education, easy access to the property ladder, free health care, job opportunities - in part due to the sacrifices of their parents' generation.

So, is Stephen counting his blessings? Far from it, he is a most unlikeable character, taking everything for granted, never satisfied with his life, completely out of touch with his own children yet berating (in private) his own parents for their lack of affection. His friend Ivan, with whom he experimented in LSD manufacture whilst at Oxford, seemed to personify anarchy as a student but ends up as an advertising executive. The only character who stands true to her rebellious student stance is Grace who certainly doesn't find her honesty rewarded.

In this very thoughtful novel, Linda Grant lets her characters speak for themselves, hanging themselves as they do so. None of them have great emotional depth as they are from a self-obsessed generation, too busy contemplating their own navels to have developed any empathy along the way. Admittedly they might veer dangerously into stereotype territory at times but the author reins them in sufficiently so we can capture the zeitgeist of a generation, clueless but well-meaning, complacent yet ambitious. It is especially interesting to compare the "baby boomers" with our current youth who genuinely don't have it so good.

So, plenty of food thought here in this insightful, extremely readable novel. You might not like the characters but you will develop an understanding of what motivates them and how their emotional and social inheritance moulded them this way. A very interesting, well written novel which will make you think, long after the final page is turned.

[David Hebblethwaite · Rating 4 out of 5]

Linda Grant’s We Had It So Good is the first title selected for the Virago Book Club; it is fair to say that this novel would not be on my radar otherwise, but I am very glad to have read it. We Had It So Good follows three generations of the same family during the second half of the last century and the first years of the current one; the focus is particularly on the baby boomers of the family, but there are themes and patterns that run across the experiences of the different generations.

Stephen Newman is an American who comes to Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship in the 1960s, but is expelled on the discovery of his drug-manufacturing activities. Not wishing to be drafted to Vietnam, the only way that Stephen can avoid having to return to the US is to marry Andrea, the English girl he met and fell in love with at Oxford. Though this is rather a marriage of convenience, it lasts; the couple move to London, at first living in an ‘urban commune,’ as their friend Ivan puts it (‘Don’t think of it as a squat,’ p. 58), but eventually making successful careers, he as a maker of science programmes for the BBC, she as a psychotherapist. They have children, Max and Marianne, whose lives come to have their own ups and downs – then Stephen finds himself in his fifties, wondering what happened to the kid he still feels he is.

Stephen is the fulcrum of Grant’s novel, though the actual structure is episodic, moving between viewpoint characters without a fixed pattern (there are a couple of confusing points where viewpoint shifts within a scene, but this is a minor issue). The effect is a series of moments building up into a whole – and, happily, We Had It So Good works well at both those levels.

Grant captures some very interesting and effective moments on the page. Sometimes, this is a result of her description; here, for example, is the young Stephen reflecting on his differing perceptions of the US and UK:

Stephen felt that he had come from a country so brand new that if you peeled off the layers of the present you would only find more present. Here, the continuous uncovering of the past, history’s insistence of not getting out of the way, was depressing. It reminded you that soon you would be bones under the ground. One day you might be a fossil unearthed and on display in the Pitt Rivers museum. (p. 13)

At other times, there are striking contrasts within scenes. One example is when Grace (one of Andrea’s and Stephen’s friends from Oxford who embraced fully their friendship group’s 1960s ideals, and has spent her life travelling abroad) visits for Christmas. Young Marianne has built up a mental image of Grace as an exotic, almost fantastical figure, with wonderful stories to tell; it’s quite a shock to her (and us) to then meet Grace and find instead a weathered woman who insults Marianne as soon as looking at her.

Shortly after this, there’s another particularly strong scene where Max performs a magic show for the assembled friends and family, and his parents’ differing reactions really illuminate their characters: he’s absorbed in trying to work out how the tricks are done, whilst she asks herself if Max’s desire to perform means she didn’t give him enough attention when he was younger. I find these and other observations of Grant’s very acute.

At the broader structural level, We Had It So Good highlights the turn of the generational wheel, and how life never quite turns out the way one expects. When Stephen looks back on his life and wonders how he got from there to here, from his youthful dreams to a middle-age which is comfortable, but still middle age, we might wonder the same – though each of his and Andrea’s decisions though life make sense at the time, we have experienced them as episodes, and so have the same sense (though for a different reason) of not understanding the complete journey.

In addition to this, the tales of the younger Andrea’s and Stephen’s exploits seem unreal to their children, who can’t reconcile what they hear with the image they have of their parents. Yet the same goes for Stephen’s parents, aspects of whose earlier lives are as unreal to him; and there is a sense that Marianne and Max are living stories that will in turn seem extraordinary to their children. So it goes on. We Had It So Good is fine both as a series of snapshots, and a larger portrait of life. And, in Linda Grant, I have another author whose work I should investigate further.

[Sónia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stephen Newman é a personagem comum às três gerações que constituem o núcleo base deste livro. Nele conhecemos a realidade de outrora em termos da emigração ilegal e também uma comparação com os dias de hoje. Em muitos casos, damos por nós a pensar nas dificuldades que gerações anteriores tiveram para singrar na vida, comparativamente com as de hoje.

A narrativa é feita a várias vozes, mas não se torna confusa, antes pelo contrário. A escrita é cativante e simples. Talvez por Stephen Newman ser o fio condutor de toda a estória e, independentemente de quem seja o narrador, sermos conduzidos a algo que lhe diga respeito, sejam fantasias ou realidades recônditas.

Não é um mero romance, é muito mais que isso! Tem uma dose excelente de humor e permite-nos conhecer alguns pormenores históricos que escapam do conhecimento através de manuais e da imprensa.

Infelizmente, creio que esta obra é daquelas que, possivelmente, nos passaria incógnita numa livraria - talvez pela autora não ser muito conhecida - mas a sua leitura é algo que nos preenche e nos deixa uma grata recordação...

[The Bookish Wombat · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was really looking forward to reading this novel and started it with an open mind, but have to say it was all a bit “meh”. It struck me as little more than an everyday story of Islington folk – a middle class soap opera.

I didn’t really sympathise with any of the characters and even felt quite distanced from them, perhaps as I’m between the ages of Stephen and Andrea and their children. Reading the book felt like watching a film I wasn’t particularly interested in; it was all going in front of me, but wasn’t involving and didn’t hook me in. This was also true of the descriptions of historical events, for example 9/11 and 7/7, as the characters’ reactions to them didn’t chime with my memories of the time.

Perhaps the most successful aspect of the novel for me was Stephen’s strong memory of trying on Marilyn Monroe’s fur aged nine, an image he treasures and returns to again and again. However, his father (who was there at the time) doesn’t remember it, which for Stephen takes away from his precious memory. This rung true for me as I’m sure we’ve all got memories like that and are bruised to discover that what is precious to us may not even have left a dent in someone else’s memory.

Another leitmotif of the book is the way that Stephen is constantly comparing himself to Bill Clinton, whom he knew when they were both Rhodes Scholars at Oxford. This comparison is (deliberately or not) ironic, as Stephen feels he has failed in his life while Clinton has succeeded. Were anyone to ask Clinton, whose Presidency ended in disgrace, about his life, he may well feel the same as Stephen. The underlying message seems to be that we all blunder about doing what we can in life, but end up in places we hadn’t planned to, not knowing how we got there. Even those who plan their path, like Andrea, can’t control anything and have very different lives to those they imagined.

The novel also seems to be saying that, even (or perhaps especially) among families, other people are ultimately unknowable and that what they say about themselves can’t always be trusted. Stephen’s father being a case in point, with his Mad Men-like identity change.

A positive aspect, however, is that having a bad upbringing doesn’t necessarily mean that the characters will have a bad life and repeat the sins of their own parents to the same extent. In our current age of misery memoirs this makes for a refreshing change.

I didn’t find all the characters totally successful – Grace was a bit too much “larger than life” and at times seemed to be there as a dreadful warning rather than as a living breathing person. Max also didn’t seem fully drawn, and there’s something a bit too pat about having Marianne always linked to sight (e.g. being a photographer) and Max being associated with hearing (e.g. he suffers temporary deafness as a child and marries a deaf woman). His interest in magic and illusion also seems to act as a metaphor for the lives of everyone in the novel – nothing is real, and what you see isn’t necessarily what you get.

Trying to write a novel covering a period of over half a century is always going to be an ambitious challenge, and though there are good things in “We Had It So Good”, I think perhaps Linda Grant’s ambition was greater than her success.

[Felice · Rating 4 out of 5]

Linda Grant writes like a dream. She has the most amazing ability to illuminate lives, to find what we all hold in those tiny corners we guard in just a few quick sentences.

Grant’s most recent novel is We Had It So Good. This time the story is about a young couple who meet at Oxford in 1969, marry, have children and eventually face up to what they thought they would be and what they have become. Stephen is a Rhodes scholar from a working class, Jewish family in California suddenly in a world he is unprepared for culturally and competitively. Andrea is the daughter of absentee parents at Oxford to study psychiatry. When Stephen gets bounced from University they marry. For Andrea it’s a love match for Stephen it’s a way to avoid Vietnam and the draft.

Surprisingly the marriage takes. The squatterville section of London they settle in during the property is evil days of the sixties ends up being worth a couple million, Andrea becomes a successful psychotherapist and they have two independent, cynical and judgmental children, Max and Marianne. Stephen uses the times to play hippie, he uses his science degree to make LSD, uses his connections to become a BBC producer , his charm to bed other women and in general sits back emotionally letting life happen to him. As the couple reaches their fifties luck seems to finally abandon them.

In middle age Stephen and Andrea and most of their friends from college days have reached a comfortable abundance in their lives. The fires they planned to light when they were young have given way to living essentially the same lives, with the same desires, as their parents. Their children are dismissive of their parents’ achievements both past and present, retirement is looming and caring for their own aging parents (The generation that saved the free world and that has to rankle.)is on the doorstep.

These rebels of the sixties have made big changes happen socially and technologically but have they come anywhere near fulfilling the promise of their early days? Taking We Had It So Good in this direction, Grant could have easily made her novel a mocking condemnation of wasted opportunity populated with caricatures of former rebels. Instead she did what she does best. She takes ordinary characters with ordinary lives and brings them, their choices and their cultural experiences into focus with a steady unsentimental eye. We Had It So Good is not Grant's best novel but it is very, very good and I will gladly take close to the best from her verses the best from a thousand other authors.

[Steve lovell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Grant's novel time-wise emcompasses a broad palette from the fifties to the present decade, and spans two continents. It swirls back and forth across these settings, taking the reader on an incredibly engaging journey. I found it, as a book, very hard to stay away from and was pleased I had an Easter break to complete it. Half way through I ordered another of Grant's offerings, the award winning 'The Clothes on Their Backs'. As the aforementioned decades are my time frame as well, I could relate to it so much, even if the journeys involved were dissimilar.
The centrepiece of the opus character-wise is the Newman family, with Stephen - son, husband and father - the main focus. The family members are all 'everyman', with perhaps the exception being Marianne who, alone of the three generations, achieves a degree of fame of sorts. From flawed lifelong friend Grace to a grandfather who hides his secrets well to a wife, the fulsomely figured - in all senses of the word - Andrea, their inter-relationships of love and loss are sensitively chartered and deeply engrossing. The UK for these is 'the land of opportunity', the US being found, for all its shininess, simply an illusion of promise. As such the novel is a portent for today's fall from grace. The great events of the period in question are alluded to as signposts spiked throughout the read, and it is Steve's daughter Marianne that suffers their impact the most. Stephen himself has a brief encounter with a man who went on to shape these world events.
Stereotypically Grant's creations follow the babyboomers' path from the addled hopes of the sixties through the reality-check decades to become the materialistic 'have-it-alls' of the noughties. The author's prose shines and shimmies, and Grant could become a very favourite!

[Hundeschlitten · Rating 2 out of 5]

I found the characters in this novel and their thoughts on the world to be insufferable. I guess I have to give Grant credit, that she's a strong enough storyteller to get me to finish a book where just about everybody in it is some variation of a self-absorbed jackass or a hopeless bore. But I'll just mention four main complaints:

1) All the main protagonists are privileged hippies who met attending Oxford. Once I figured that out, I should have stopped reading right then and there, because there are few things I hate more on the planet than privileged Boomer hippies.

2) America is a major theme of the book, but Grant paints our country in the hoariest of cliches. L.A. is sunny, glamorous, optimistic, and filled with beautiful people. Middle America is flat, boring, irredeemable, and populated by a bunch of ignorant fatsos. As a native Californian who now lives in the Midwest, let me just say I find her take on both to be superficial at best. In brief, I find L.A.'s "optimism" to be skin deep. It is a land that eats its young. And I find most Midwesterners to have a core decency, a little of which most of the self-obsessed SOBs in Grant's novel could have used.

3) There are a series of extended table discussions on the issues of our day (ex: advertising, terrorism, "selling out") that operate on the intellectual level of a daytime TV coffee klatsch.

4) Just about everything interesting from the era gets ignored. I was hoping that a novel about a bunch of "avant garde" friends coming of age in England during the late 1960's/early 70's might include cameos or references to David Bowie, Nick Drake, T Rex, Led Zeppelin, etc. Instead we get a few facile genuflections about Bob Dylan. Yawn.

[Always Pink · Rating 4 out of 5]

»Our parents had the war. That was their big thing. We had ideals," Ivan said, "most of them cranky and failed, but we did dream, didn't we?"

Dreamers indeed. Linda Grant gives us an astute portrayal of the Hippie generation as a kind of lost generation. Four friends are telling the story: Stephen, the ultimate American sunnyboy, never growing up and spending his whole life playing, while eating candy and taking drugs; his wife Andrea, a practically-minded psychiatrist who seems to find solace in the agony of her patients; Grace, the beauty with "a profound understanding of surfaces",about whom Andrea remarks: "Her life was like scaffolding: it held her up from the outsinde"; Ivan, a mercantile genius, who is effortlessly making lots of money in advertising and secured himself a soap-opera star for a wife.
Their generation and views are counterposed by Marianne and Max, the children of Andrea and Stephen. "Marianne thought her parents' Generation where phoneys. They had been given everything and squandered it, they had "eaten up the planet"."
I will have to think about that one for a while. I love the unconventional construction of the story, with its jumps in time, the oddball protagonists and Grant's clear-sighted dissection of their motivations and shortcomings. But was the hippie generation in hindsight really just a huge missed chance, a golden age of mankind with magic opportunities, that the children of love let run through their fingers like sand?

[Joanne Flanagan · Rating 1 out of 5]

I received this book as a prize in a goodreads giveaway. I was interested to read the story based on the description of Stephen trying on Marilyn Monroe's fur coat. That is about as good as the story gets.

I read other reviews after I read this story and I guess I just don't get it. If I didn't have to write a review to fulfill the agreement for accepting the book, I wouldn't have bothered to finish reading it.

The book reads as a series of short stories jumping between third person and first person pov. I had to reread portions to figure out who was speaking. In the third person chapters I was looking for more information about each character.

The story spans forty years weaving in some historical events. The children of the main characters are born and then are suddenly in their 20s (the age at which their parents wed) and seem to have no connection with them.

I'm sorry that I didn't enjoy the book more.

[Richard · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed reading 'We Had It So Good.' It's never dull and charts a period of time in my own lifetime. Having said that I felt that Linda Grant has tried to do too much in the book. She attempts to tell a social history of Britain and the US in the book together with the stories of the main characters. Sometimes the collision between the characters and real events is a little clunky.

[Laura Alderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

A dense, multi generational novel with much to think about. Mainly following Stephen from the time he left the US to go to Oxford on a scholarship. You meet his friends and family, especially the ones he met at Oxford and you follow his life, and the lives of those near to him, for about 40 years. The characters are very well drawn and complex and all make decisions and choices which alter the course of their lives. Some have secrets, some passions and interests and I loved following them all. It was quite a slow read, which I mainly enjoyed. I got a bit fed up with his moaning and I suppose I would have liked more to actually "happen" but I did enjoy it.

[Lucy · Rating 4 out of 5]

We are introduced to Stephen, he is just nine at the time we meet him and he is in trouble! His father has caught him dressed in a mink fur that is owned by none other than Marilyn Monroe…. I will save the rest of this story for the book but suffice it to say it is a pivotal moment in Stephen's life and it pops up again throughout the book. It gives us an insight into the notion that what appears to be a huge event for a child can in fact be forgotten by the parent. After this introduction we then have the great pleasure of following Stephen on his journey through life. We join him on a voyage across the sea to pastures new where he bumps into one Bill Clinton on the boat and they share stories and dinner. We are there when he meets his wife in Oxford seen for the first time as he peers over the wall at the two eccentric girls who have moved in next door. We are even at the conception of one of his children and we are there when he corners the market in LSD.

I was hooked from the offset. It made a great change to read a story of a simple life as opposed to those that feature major upheavals, of course there are the major world events, but these are considered more for the effect they have on him in an emotional context as opposed to a physical one. You get to share his life as it unfolds. As such, you meander on the journey with him. Make friends with his friends, glimpse his enemies and feel his sorrow. In doing so look back over the last forty years or so and the history of our country through the eyes of an American who makes our country his home.

I really enjoyed this book. It took me back to times I remember from my youth and was so well written that you really think you are reading an autobiography. I look forward to reading more of Linda's book!

[Katherine · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Stephen felt that he had come from a country so brand-new that if you peeled off the layers of the present, you would only find more present” (13).
“This was what the petits fours on board the SS United States had been preparing them for: really small things. They were much too big for Oxford, for staircases they could take two steps at a time, ceilings too low, rooms too cramped, and professors who lacked a certain zest” (13).
“Everyone is smiling, urging her to have a nice day, the first time she has heard this expression. It was a void statement. How could a supermarket checkout girl know what lay in store for you? Maybe you’d just had a cancer diagnosis, or lost all your money, or were on your way to a funeral. Yet the desire for others to be happy was slotted into a brief commercial transaction. Was unhappiness a rebellion against that great wall of social bliss?” (85).
“This is having your cake and eating it, and what a strange cake. A cake with salt instead of sugar” (191).
"She simply wanted to be in that place where she could find an unusual range of human expressions, instead of the flat complacency of people who were miserable in all the usual, banal ways" (260).
"'I had him cremated and put his ashes on the compost heap'" (271).
"Stephen supposed they had died before the internet, perhaps they could be located ino ne of the squares of an AIDS quilt" (280).
“The pain was hers, inside her. He didn’t understand why she didn’t take HRT, the wonder drug, but she said it scared her. Eventually he talked her into it, it starts with the pill and it ends with HRT, she thought, a life bracketed by artificial hormones” (283).

[Margaret Chamberlain · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this very slowly because I didn't want it to end. If you like books that explore the feelings of growing old, and thinking back to how you were when you were young and wondering what has happened to the time that has passed so quickly you will love this book like I did. The characters met when they were young at university and we follow their lives very closely until they are middle aged. The main character has come up in the World and left his roots behind him, this is another theme I find fascinating. It's the feeling that you are being disloyal to your upbringing by becoming educated & middle class but realsing that you were the same person inside all along.
I have read many other books by Linda Grant and this is a recurring theme, and one commonly explored by the baby boomer generation. we did have it so good, as the title suggests and I think we are just beginning to realise it as those coming after us are having such a difficult time.

[Tuck · Rating 3 out of 5]

We all know the plot: England and USA from WWII to 2011. We all know the characters: mom, dad, daughter, son. This novel follows these folks and their friends, parents, enemies, freaks and fools, and even some middle class heroes (all the same people) through the 20th and 21st century of privileged, imperial, ostrich-like, thinking, and inventing of the most influential? countries around. A very nice novel, but I thought William Boyd did it better in "Any Human Heart" even though his novel dealt with the world mostly via the world of art. Any Human Heart
Some say this "We Had It..." is better than Franzen's "Freedom", but i will just have to take their word for it.

[Sarah Laing · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love Linda Grant as a writer that I am familiar with - I think I return to her for comfort, as I know what kind of story she'll write, and I know that I will enjoy it. In that context, I didn't find it 'life-changing', or 'searing' but it was a gentle examination of human frailty and relationships, of perceived mistakes, of taking a long-term view of people's lives. I loved the way that a preconception of a relationship was, by the end of the book, turned on its head. And it had a happy ending of sorts. I like that in a book.

[Dorothy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had mixed feelings about this book. Linda Grant is undoubtedly a good writer but for the first half of the book, I felt the tone was too flat and unemotional and I really didn't feel connected with any of the characters.

The story gathers more momentum in the second half so I was then motivated to read to the end but was not really satisfied when I finished it. She has some good ideas, but again I felt they are presented in such a way that they have not stayed in my mind.

I'll probably try another of her books to see if this is her normal style.

[Stephen · Rating 4 out of 5]

interesting novel looking at the lives of stephen and andrea and how they and the free roaming era of the 1960's and how over time the hope and dreams can be eroded, felt first part of book was abit over the place but got better as the novel went on

[Peebee · Rating 1 out of 5]

Boring boring boring. A book where nothing really happens until the end, and by that point, you just don't care anymore.

[Rhoda · Rating 3 out of 5]

Stephen is the son of a Polish Jewish immigrant and a Cuban mother living in California. In the 1960s he goes to England to study science at Oxford and meets an intellectual group of hippies. He eventually marries one of them - the offbeat red-haired beauty Andrea and they go on to raise their two children Marianne and Max.

This book is a passage of time style story that focuses on Stephen and his family, with a definite homage to the sixties and against the backdrop of social change and events including the war in Bosnia, September 11 and the London bombings.

This style of writing brings to mind A Spool of Blue Thread and Larry’s Party type books, but I have to say that I found those books better than this one. Undoubtedly the author’s writing is superb and the flow and texture of it will propel you through this book with next to no real plot, but plenty to reflect upon.

What wasn’t so engaging from my perspective was that I didn’t feel any real connection or even much interest in any of the characters. Stephen was not a particularly likeable character, but not in a way that made me love to hate him, but in a way that was just bland and a bit irritating. The few characters that had the potential to be interesting were frustratingly not examined in any great depth.

While I found this to be an ok read, nothing stands out as being particularly memorable to me and I can’t see myself remembering much about this book or the characters twelve months from now. ⭐️⭐️⭐️/5

[Ann · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful read!

This story shows the serendipitous nature of life and how happenstance informs many relationships and decisions.

Stephen Newman is a transplanted American who never planned to live in London. But his Oxford scholarship sends him across the pond and away from the Los Angeles sunshine. While at school he moves into a tiny house next door to two oddly-dressed girls.

Stephen's two children don't half believe the stories their staid father tells about his youth. From his current perspective, over forty years later, he can't believe the life he and his wife Andrea created.

Their children's lives take curious turns and Stephen feels like he doesn't really know them. Then there are Stephen's immigrant parents whose life seems a far cry from his own. The family visit to the U.S. is worth reading the book for alone.

Brilliantly evocative of times and places and true-to-life characters.

[Paul Rosen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mixed feelings about this one. I enjoyed reading the first three-quarters, and found it compelling enough to read much more consistently and regularly than I've been doing recently. As the book progressed, though, I began to lose track as the focus became more diffuse. I guess it's a challenge taking people through their lives from childhood through to the beginnings of old age, alongside their parents and offspring, without losing the focus of a book that has a more concise setting. By the end I've lost whatever sense I had of the objective of the book. It now seems to be trying to convey the ultimate failure of the 1960s' optimism, so I'm left feeling somewhat deflated, although I share that viewpoint in many ways. Like Stephen, I'm wondering whether there was much point to it all, and whether that generation has actually just been a bit of a disappointment.

[Barbara · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book doesn't have a plot but is instead an account of the lives of three generations in the USA and the UK. So in that sense, it feels a bit old-fashioned. The characters, however, are not old-fashioned at all but really quite intriguing. The book raises questions about what gives us our identity, what makes us happy or unhappy, the extent to which people's life journeys are formed by accidental events or other people's decisions and whims. The black crows which appear at the beginning and the end of the story are a reminder of the abyss which exists under the surface - not that Linda Grant's admirers will need to be reminded.

[Merrilie Rowley · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nearly 4 * ! I enjoyed most of this book but by the end I felt it had lost its pace and was grinding to a halt ! Which of course was probably what was intended ! An interesting mix of characters some of whom had some unimaginably awful parents to deal with. Growing up in the 60's was certainly interesting and if you were up for it, possibly exciting but in retrospect I think most of us were watching from the sidelines!

[Samir Rawas Sarayji · Rating 1 out of 5]

Honestly, I never thought a story could contain redundant story material and be published. This book would have probably done better with a more stringent editor. The short and snappy sentences also don’t work for a novel of this length that is trying to “illuminate” life. Bah.

[Thomas McDade · Rating 3 out of 5]

"The result, clearly intended as a portrait of the baby-boom generation, feels more like a composite sketch. There is no plot—only the passage of time, which forces the characters through history."

-The New Yorker

Max the magician my favorite character

[Julianne · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book about the life of friends in England. It was an excellent reflection on all stages of life as seen through the main character and his friends and family. Skillfully written to make us care about all of the characters.

[Sandra · Rating 4 out of 5]

Four stars for the achievement - the assembling of its many-stranded cast, the interlocking of their personalities, the complexity and variety of their stories within their times and histories, but one star deducted for the ever-present shallowness of Stephen.