Michael Frayn’s Memoir of His Father

Illustration by Joon Mo Kang, photographs by Colin McPherson/Corbis, left, and courtesy of Michael Frayn

Story by CHRISTOPHER BUCKLEY
New York Times, March 6, 2011

MY FATHER’S FORTUNE

A Life
By Michael Frayn
Illustrated. 273 pp.
Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt & Company. US$25.

Contemporary British letters do not lack for memoirs, autobiographies and other works in which the main event is the father-son relationship. John Mortimer’s wonderful play “A Voyage Round My Father,” about his dad, a celebrated, blind barrister; Max Hastings’s funny and touching “Did You Really Shoot the Television?,” about his feckless but irresistible father; Auberon Waugh’s sublimely titled “Will This Do?,” about life with Evelyn, who comes off (to my mind, anyway) as the Dad From Hell; then there is Auberon’s own son Alexander’s superb multigenerational layer-cake memoir, featuring ­Auberon-Evelyn-Arthur; Martin Amis’s nuanced but adoring portrait of his dad, Kingsley; and most recently Christopher Hitchens’s brilliant “Hitch-22,” featuring his complex, fraught relationship with his father, Commander Hitchens of the Royal Navy. Rich terrain — and I’ve probably omitted a dozen or so others.

Comes now Michael Frayn’s “My Father’s Fortune,” about his dad. Frayn says at the outset that his father has been dead for 40 years and that he wrote the book at the urging of his 47-year-old daughter, Rebecca, who wanted to know more about her antecedents. One senses that Frayn was initially reticent about the project; but by the time it ends, as many such books do, on a confessional, apologetic note, you feel his relief at having gotten it out. Rebecca owes her dad a kiss and a big thank-you.

Michael Frayn is probably best known in the United States for his hugely successful 1982 comedy, “Noises Off,” which was nominated for a Tony Award for best play. He is probably next-best-known here for his drama “Copenhagen,” about — as Monty Python used to put it, “and now for something completely different” — an encounter in 1941 between the German physicist Werner Heisenberg and the Danish physicist Niels Bohr. It won the Tony for best play in 2000.

Full review at the New York Times.

Footnote:
Published in the UK by Faber.
Read Daily Telegraph review here.