It would not be fair to dismiss Alison Larkin’s The English
American out of hand for its frivolity. Everyone knows that books
with large text and little subtext between their widely spaced lines
make for the best bus reading, and Larkin’s first novel has an
easy-to-follow voice that easily accommodates the stops and starts of a
fitful attention span.
Even the most distracted bus rider, though, won’t fail to notice
that The English American isn’t easy to read because it’s
frivolous; it’s easy to read because it’s bad. Larkin’s
sentences unfold with such hackneyed predictability that reading each
one in its entirety hardly seems necessary.
The heroine of Larkin’s semi-autobiographical novel is a young woman
named Pippa Dunn, who was born in America but raised in England by
adoptive parents. That moniker alone should send up an immediate red
flag: Such a whimsically named character will inevitably suffer from
Bridget Jones Syndrome, and indeed, Pippa is a textbook case. Beautiful
but clumsy, loves chocolate, romantically clueless, charmingly
exuberant yet prone to making the odd harmless social gaffe…. Someone
needs to send this over-used archetype back to middle school for social
reconditioning.
We are informed early on that Pippa has never quite fit in with her
adoptive family:
“We don’t say ‘I love you’ in England. Not like the Americans do…
Right now I wish Mum and I were American so I could tell her I love
her.”
When Pippa decides to track down her American birth parents, she
discovers the roots of her very un-British personality in her mother’s
high energy and her father’s charm. Her initial delight at finding her
true self reflected in her parents, though, soon wanes. Her mother, at
first so charismatic, soon becomes a “devouring sea monster,” while her
father is involved in shady-seeming international dealings. Pippa
ultimately must choose between the parents who raised her and the
parents who gave her birth. Guess which ones she chooses.
Larkin is apparently a funny actress with a popular one-woman comedy
show. Unfortunately, a voice that might be charming onstage becomes
predictable, trite, and decidedly un-fun when committed to paper.