Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury) | FICTION STI | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Stillwater Public Library | FICTION STI | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
A New York Times Notable Book of 2015: From the writer of the hugely acclaimed Love, Nina comes a sharply funny debut novel about a gloriously eccentric family.
Soon after her parents' separation, nine-year-old Lizzie Vogel moves with her siblings and newly single mother to a tiny village in the English countryside, where the new neighbors are horrified by their unorthodox ways and fatherless household. Lizzie's theatrical mother only invites more gossip by spending her days drinking whiskey, popping pills, and writing plays.
The one way to fit in, the children decide, will be to find themselves a new man at the helm. The first novel from a remarkably gifted writer with a voice all her own, Man at the Helm is a hilarious and occasionally heartbreaking portrait of childhood in an unconventional family.
Author Notes
Nina Stibbe is the author of Love, Nina: A Nanny Writes Home and Man at the Helm.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* The lives of nine-year-old Lizzie and her family are turned upside down when her father's affair is discovered. Mother and children are forced to move from their posh London digs to a small English village. Any thoughts of tranquil country living disappear as the locals shun the entire family for being a single-parent household, without a man at the helm. Lizzie and her sister decide to find one, creating a list of eligible local bachelors, one of which they hope will be perfect for their mother, whose apathy following the divorce has manifested itself with heavy drinking, pill-popping, and obsessive playwriting. The family contends with village politics, nosy neighbors, changing finances, assorted charismatic pets, and a parade of potential suitors who are, unfortunately, just plain unsuitable. There could be no better narrator than Lizzie. She is bright, witty, and charming, an object of both sympathy and admiration. Stibbe gives her and her siblings a sense of self well beyond their years and the dialogue to accompany it. This is an impressive first novel, a combination of P. G. Wodehouse pacing and the eccentricity of Gerald Durrell's My Family and Other Animals (1956). An extraordinarily well-written, deeply satisfying read about an unusual, highly entertaining group of people.--Gladstein, Carol Copyright 2014 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
NINA STIBBE: "I'M trying to write a novel. ... Was just about to show AB a little synopsis and a few pages " Nina Stibbe: "Did you read my thing?" Alan Bennett: "Yes, it was funny." Mary-Kay Wilmers: "What's it about?" Alan Bennett: "I'm not sure. ... A bunch of literary types doing laundry and making salad - or something." Nina Stibbe: "I think I've given you a letter to my sister by mistake." readers who couldn't get enough of Nina Stibbe's offhandedly witty memoir, "Love, Nina" - composed of dialogue-filled letters sent home from her job as a nanny in the freewheeling household of Mary-Kay Wilmers, editor of The London Review of Books and neighbor of the writer Alan Bennett - may at first be disappointed to learn that the novel Stibbe was toying with back in the 1980s doesn't sound much like "Man at the Helm," her first foray into fiction, published in Britain last summer. The only remotely literary types in its pages are a newly single mother fond of transforming her personal trials into hilariously bad plays and her two daughters, diligently revising what they've come to call the Man List, an extremely flexible catalog of possible candidates to be her next husband. But never fear: This densely populated coming-of-age story (for both mother and children) has retained and even expanded on Stibbe's signature antic charm. Lizzie, the narrator, may be only 9 and her sister only 11, but they and their younger brother have seen enough of life in 1970 s Leicestershire to become convinced that "if a lone female is left, especially if divorced, without a man at the helm, all the friends and family and acquaintances run away." This, they conclude, is a situation they must rectify on their own, since their mother has declared herself "temperamentally unsuited" to anything resembling practicality. It doesn't help that their wealthy father, after a brief fling with "Phil from the factory," has established a new household with a new wife and child, and has shunted off his old brood to a rural village where outsiders are barely tolerated and a woman with a drinking problem and a pill problem and (at least at the beginning) a flagrantly disposable income is bound to be monitored with a great deal of suspicious interest. It also doesn't help that Lizzie and her bossy older sister (whose first name remains grandly unspoken throughout, perhaps because she's the only person remotely resembling an authority figure) have somewhat hazy notions of what's actually involved in courtship, let alone mating. "I knew so little about men," Lizzie confesses, "only really that they loved fires and omelets and needed constant snacks." Her brother, Little Jack, quizzed on what husbandly attributes would be preferable, merely remarks that "he liked a man with deep pockets. Not meaning it metaphorically but literally - him having just gone into pocketed trousers himself and thrilled at the possibilities. He also wanted someone with an interest in owls and Romans." Lizzie's sister "felt strongly that we needed a man who would answer the front door." Is it any wonder the Man List comes to feature quite a number of dubious possibilities, many of them already married? The girls decide to send letters, signed in their mother's name, inviting various prospects round to have a drink with her in hopes "that it would lead to sexual intercourse," which, they figure, is likely in turn to lead to the altar. Needless to say, their vetting process can be somewhat eccentric, as in this assessment of a horsy fellow named Mr. Oliphant: "He wore a cloth cap but in a well-dressed kind of way and had nice jackets albeit farmer-style, and had a nice rounded lump in his trousers which, my sister explained, meant good underpants and the English arrangement of his male parts, bunched up, as opposed to the European way of having it all hanging down one trouser leg and looking lopsided. Plus hiding, she said, the obviousness of an unwanted arousal. Also, Mr. Oliphant's financial stability was reassuring." The suitably presentable Mr. Oliphant turns out to be just one in a parade of oblivious suitors: the local representative of the Liberal Party, a veterinarian, a doctor, an accountant who's an expert on bees, even Little Jack's teacher. The butcher is disqualified (Lizzie's sister is a vegetarian), as is Mr. Nesbit, an old man with a beard and a wooden leg and a Suez Canal fixation, although the real reason is "we couldn't have someone on the list who habitually shouted 'Get off and milk it' as we rode past him on our ponies." But although their mother succeeds well enough in the sack (including a 13-day interlude with the vicar), nobody manages to hold her interest - until she falls for a shifty odd-job man, a specialist in plumbing and pest control named Charlie Bates. "He wasn't on the list," Lizzie complains, "and had no right turning up like that. The problem was, we were to discover later, he looked like Frank Sinatra - though it must have been when Frank was gnarled and the whites of his eyes were bloodshot in the mornings and yellowish all day." There's a certain amount of drama (not to mention mystery and skulduggery) on the Charlie Bates front, but the appeal of Stibbe's novel lies less in plotting than in the way she shades a sequence of comic vignettes with seriously sad undertones - Lizzie and Little Jack's outing for lunch at a fancy restaurant with their already disapproving father, in which Little Jack plays at being a dog, then refuses to go back to being a boy; the girls' trips alone on the train to London, combining exhilarating city adventures with visits to a doctor's office to collect extra drugs for their mother. As money and options dwindle, the dark tones become more evident. The Mercedes is replaced by a Hillman, the village mansion and its adjoining stable by a cookie-cutter prefab in a housing estate, the maternal mornings in bed nursing a hangover by all-too-clearheaded early risings as a van driver for an outfit called Snowdrop Laundry Services. ("Have you ever been in employment?" Lizzie's mother is asked at her initial interview. To which she replies, "I was a seamstress once for two weeks - but that was in a play.") It's not giving too much away to say that redemption, of a kind, will ensue. And it's not too much of a stretch to conclude that "Man at the Helm," with its jauntily matter-of-fact social satire, wouldn't be out of place on the same shelf as "Cold Comfort Farm" and "I Capture the Castle." 'Without a man at the helm, all the friends and family and acquaintances run away.' ALIDA BECKER is an editor at the Book Review.
Kirkus Review
Divorce leaves an unreliable mother and her three concerned children adrift in an unfriendly village in this first novel from Stibbe, whose memoir (Love, Nina, 2014) was an acclaimed comic debut.Narrated in a nave yet confident voice by 10-year-old Lizzie Vogel, the middle child, the book traces an unconventional family's progress after marital derailment in 1970s England. Filtered through Lizzie's idiosyncratic perspective, the sad and serious prospect of a household falling apart as the mother struggles with loneliness, depression, drink and pills shades away from tragedy toward the absurd. The family relocates from comfortable suburbia to a new village home where Lizzie and her sister find themselves not only unpopular, but also, they fear, in danger of being made wards of the court. While attempting to take care of their mother, they decide their job is also to find her a boyfriend, a new man at the helm to steady and safeguard the ship of family. Making a list of local candidates, with no concern about whether they're already married or not, the girls set up romantic encounters by writing letters in their mother's name. The results are predictably chaotic. Ridiculous episodes, like a pony climbing the stairs, are interspersed with more perturbing developments, including financial disasters and the nervous problems of younger brother Jack. And yet, despite increasing poverty and the move to another, smaller home, the family's fortunes eventually shift, with the helm being taken by a man almost as eccentric as the Vogels themselves. Charming and bittersweet, with a very English flavor, this social comedy is distinguished by Stibbe's light touch and bright eye. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
[DEBUT]One overheard phone call can bring down a family; this is something ten-year-old Lizzie Vogel knows all too well. The year is 1970, and confronted with the fact of her husband's infidelity, Lizzie's mother takes the feminist road, with her three kids, to set up a new life in a small English country village. Here, Lizzie and her siblings must adjust to their new reality: their mother has gone off the rails, drinking too much and working too little, and they must learn to fend for themselves amid the judgment of a closed-minded community. Naturally, Lizzie and her sister conclude that a new man for their mother is the solution to their family's problems, and so begins their project of the Man List. They soon find themselves engaged in all manner of shenanigans along the way-including overflowing washers and horses in the upstairs bedroom. Verdict From the bittersweet to the humorous and absurd, Stibbe's debut novel is touching and appealing, sure to speak to the heart, especially of any reader with divorced parents. Fans of her acclaimed memoir, Love, Nina: A Nanny Writes Home, will also place this on their holds list. [See Prepub Alert, 9/15/14; for read-alikes, see Neal Wyatt's RA Crossroads, 3/24/14; ow.ly/KL3MC.]-Leigh Wright, Bridgewater, NJ © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
