We Had It So Good: A Novel

by Linda Grant

Paperback, 2012

Status

Available

Publication

Scribner (2012), Edition: Reprint, 352 pages

Description

In 1968 Stephen Newman arrives in England from California. Sent down from Oxford, he hurriedly marries his English girlfriend Andrea to avoid returning to America and the draft board. Over the next forty years they and their friends build lives of middle-class success until the events of late middle-age and the new century force them to realise that their fortunate generation has always lived in a fool's paradise.

Media reviews

Los Angeles and London, men and women, parents and children, friends and enemies, war and peace, all cohabit here, none more or less important or any less mysterious than any other. Everyone here feels real, sometimes more real than they might feel to themselves — and that also feels true. Grant
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offers the melancholy pleasure of tolling the bells for a generation that is gradually fading away. Their bright colors, however fleeting or illusory, will be missed.
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1 more
This is at once an attack on the 1960s generation, painting them as smug, hypocritical hippie capitalists, and also a defence, showing that they, like everyone, just did their best. Like the best novels, it makes you examine your own moral compass alongside that of its characters.

User reviews

LibraryThing member ccayne
I agree with the other reviewer - tedious. Grant has been shortlisted for the Booker so she has talent but it was not on display here. The characters were flat and the narrative scattered.
LibraryThing member SheReadsNovels
Stephen Newman is getting older and is finding it difficult to come to terms with the way his life has turned out. What happened to his hopes and ambitions, to the generation that was going to change the world?

We Had It So Good follows the story of Stephen and his family over several decades during
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the second half of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first. At times reading this book was almost like watching one of those nostalgic television documentaries that show us snapshots of life in previous decades. As the years go by we see how Stephen and Andrea change over time and have had to abandon some of their dreams - but with Stephen in particular there's always that feeling of regret, that he's settled for second-best, and he does at one point decide that "that was what life was, perennially settling for less".

The book doesn't have much of a plot, concentrating instead on painting a detailed and realistic portrait of the Newman family. Despite the lack of action though, there are still some moments of drama - mainly the types of small dramas that most people will experience in their lifetime - and there were even a few surprises and revelations that I didn't see coming.

Linda Grant's writing is of a high quality and she develops her characters in great detail from their appearance and the clothes they wear, to their likes and dislikes, hopes and fears. And yet throughout the first half of the book I didn't feel any personal involvement in their story and always felt slightly detached from what was going on. Although the Newmans and their friends felt believable and real to me, I didn't think I liked them enough to want to spend 340 pages reading about their everyday lives. But halfway through the book I started to warm to some of the characters and as a result, the story became more compelling. And once I had settled into the pace of the writing, I started to enjoy it.

It was interesting to see how Stephen as an American (with a Polish immigrant father and a Cuban mother) adapted to life in England, first at Oxford and then in London. I also liked reading about the relationship between Stephen and his father, Si. Stephen and Andrea's daughter, Marianne, is another intriguing character. And this review wouldn't be complete without mentioning Andrea's best friend, Grace, who is quite a sad and solitary figure, trying to run away from her past. Although she's not the most pleasant of people, with a hard, prickly personality, I was far more interested in Grace than in the Newmans.

I should point out that I'm probably not really the target audience for this book and although I did end up enjoying it, I can see that it would probably be appreciated more by readers of Stephen and Andrea's generation. However, the book still left me with a lot of things to think about, from bigger issues such as immigration, family relationships and generational differences to the smaller ones, such as the principles behind the advertising of washing powder!
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LibraryThing member dsc73277
The life of a couple, their family and close friends from the 1960s to the first decade of the twenty first century. He is an American who comes to Britain as a Rhodes scholar, and later marries an English girl to avoid returning home and being sent to fight in Vietnam. What begins as a marriage of
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convenience, turns into a strong and lasting relationship, and turns out perhaps their greatest achievement in life. Some of the big events of the last forty years feature in the background, whilst others, such as the Bosnian War and the London bombings of July 2005 impinge more directly. Stephen, the male lead, ends up regretting that his generation failed to make more of the opportunities presented to it, and feeling somewhat inferior both to his parents generation, which survived the Second World War, and his children and their peers, with their tough resiliance. Sometimes I liked it a lot, at other times I began to lose interest, but it was worth hanging on for the highly emotional climax.
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LibraryThing member herschelian
I really enjoyed reading this book. Over the years Linda Grant's writing has got better and better.
Like the protagonist of this novel, I too came to the UK from abroad - whereas Stephen Newman's first experience of English life was Oxford, mine
(courtesy of a boyfriend ) was Cambridge; other than
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that it was all remarkably similar, and I was amazed by how well the author had managed to nail down the zeitgeist. Then as the years rolled by I kept thinking - wow, she must know people we know, this IS how it was.
If you live elsewhere, a trip down north London memory lane is not really a selling point. However LG writes beautifully and the book stands on its own as a description of what the past means to individuals, how anyone looks back at life, what the true meaning and value of family is - or not - as the case may be..
I urge you to read it - you won't be disappointed.
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LibraryThing member DubaiReader
Thank goodness that's finished.

There are only two reasons why I finished this book - because I had to read it for a book group and because it was being narrated to me by the brave Paul Panting on behalf of Audible. It was quite simply, tedious. There was little narrative that grabbed me, I felt the
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story line was just a tool to allow the author to express her opinions on every major event that has taken place since 1960. We had the baby boom and the contraceptive pill, hippies and LSD, the rise and rise of television, house prices and 9/11. ....And a great deal more besides.
One discussion did interest me - the one about advertising, and one really annoyed me - the idea of 'time', how cliche is that?? The repetition of the idea that the generation represented would never get old was also worn thin by the end of the book.

The main character was the rather unlikable Stephen Newman. He is mixed race, half Cuban, half Polish, and has spent his childhood in America. He is very much an American, however, even once he finds himself living in Oxford and then London, UK. He marries Andrea in order to avoid being called back to the States to fight in the Vietnam war and they progress from squatting students to middle class comfort, with 2.5 children. And that's about as exciting as it gets.

I enjoyed Linda Grant's book about life in Palestine in the post-war era, When I Lived in Modern Times, but this felt like it had been written by another author entirely.
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LibraryThing member Steve38
A pretty boring book to be honest. Can't see why it was shortlisted for the Booker prize. A family saga based around an Oxford student couple from the 60s. Linda Grant ties it all together by linking various family members and friends to events culled from the news headlines. The Holocaust, 9/11,
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7/7, the Bosnian War - they are all there. The characters are uninvolving, the writing is flat and one-paced. With the book as with the family at the heart of it the reaction at the end is 'Who cares?'.
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LibraryThing member lizchris
From the start, I thought this was to be a novel about an American in London, and my heart sank when a young Bill Clinton made a cameo appearance.
But this turned into a novel about the gulf between generations in the 20th and 21st centuries, lost idealism and lives passed without noticing.
The
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children barely tolerate their parents' stories about living in a squat in 1970s London, almost despising their parents while admiring their college friend Grace, who wanders the globe apparently refusing to settle.
My favourite strand of the book is about how we age without noticing, and don't realise what we've lost until it's too late.
"I keep thinking of all the people I've known in London, all these years of living here. They pass through your life and ....if you saw them, you'd cry , because you'd understand for the first time how old you are, and that it's all long gone and we didn't treasure it. We thought there was no way it would not last for ever, together with our hair."
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LibraryThing member Ameise1
This was an interesting reading about a couple, their families and friends during 50 years. It starts out in 1968 and the young couple feels being a part of the big family who wants to change the social conventions. While society changes remain some of the protagonists in this time stuck while
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others adapt to the changes. Because most live under the same roof is the coexistence not always easy, as many emotions are not expressed and the majority feels misunderstood. It always needs a dramatic experience as a farewell, a separation or the death of that individual characters are open to others.
Grant writes with a great love and a lot of understanding for her characters. As a reader you get great understanding of their actions.
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LibraryThing member gayla.bassham
A really, really lovely book.
LibraryThing member oldblack
I liked this book very much. Linda Grant seems to me to have a perceptive and interesting take on the era and events that have dominated my life. She writes about the larger society - the war in the former Yugoslavia, 9/11 and the impact of terrorist activity in London - which was made especially
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relevant as I read the book as the London Bridge terrorist incident of June 2017 occurred. But more than that, she focuses on individuals as members of families and the role of truth and deception in family relationships. Especially relevant to me was her treatment of the end stages of life - people dying suddenly and others dying slowly, and how we look back on our lives.
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LibraryThing member Rdra1962
Too long and whiny with barley likable characters.
LibraryThing member camharlow2
A captivating and wholly absorbing novel that spans the times from the late 1960s to the late 2000s. It traces the life of Stephen Newman a she leaves America to begin studying at Oxford University. Gradually his ambition of making a substantial contribution to changing society is whittled away and
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he settles for what he sees as a less fulfilling life. His disappointment is contrasted to the approach by his wife Andrea, who he marries so that he can settle in Britain and thus avoid the draft for the Vietnam War. Stephen’s discomfort is the greatest of his family and friends from his Oxford days, but by the end of the period with the death of his father and wife, he reflects that he has reached a new understanding of how to take positives from one’s achievements. This lesson is also true to the other main characters, although they realised this earlier in their lives. Linda Grant has written a rich, scintillating and entertaining novel about how we live our lives and how we are never too old to learn or change, although there are hints of problems to come for Stephen’s descendants.
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Language

Original language

English

Original publication date

2011-01-20 [2011]
2011-04-26 [2011]

Physical description

352 p.; 5.25 inches

ISBN

1451617453 / 9781451617450

Local notes

Fiction
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