The Rich Man's Table Book

When oil tycoon David Samuel Glendale gets blown up, new widow (and sixties icon) Felicity Craven expects to assuage her grief with his sizeable fortune. But the said fortune is bequeathed to a mistress in Texas-which means Fliss will be reduced to "shopping at John Lewis and getting her cash from a hole in the wall". To add insult to injury, her "confirmed bachelor" brother Sebastian gets embroiled in a rent-boy scandal; and utterly nondescript secretary Claire Brown finds that she is carrying Glendale's baby, after losing her virginity to him at an office party, and from then on in it's larky chaos all the way.As that summary might suggest, Simon Temprell's debut novel is a glittering fluffball, stuffed with familiar and improbable glitterati stereotypes--most memorably the Cravens' incipiently senile mother, "a Carnaby Street relic, an old woman in a time warp that never even belonged to her in the first place". At times, Temprell seems to straining after EF Benson and Ronald Firbank, but often falls nearer the published oeuvre of Rupert Everett.Where he has an undeniable edge, however, is in fleeting moments of seriousness: his characterisation of the interminably beige Claire Brown, although always teetering on the patronising, has flashes of something like insight into her pedestrian life-and it is there, rather than in the epigrammatic clichés of the craven Cravens that he might be well advised to delve in the future. --Alan StewartRead More