The Only Good Thing Anyone Has Ever Done (Paperback)

Funny, clever, Generation-X first novel from star UEA graduate. Think Tibor Fischer, Douglas Coupland, Chuck Palahniuk.

Sandra Newman's first novel is set in contemporary California. The unusual style, at times reminiscent of a report with its lists and bullet points, reflects the troubled mind of the narrator and draws the reader into her bizarre existence. 30-year-old Chrysalis Moffat tries to chronicle her life, but every fact seems suspect. Her adoptive parents are both dead and she knows nothing of her biological parents. At age three she was brought from Peru to live with a rich Californian couple who have one young son, Eddie. Her privileged lifestyle in a mansion by the sea is abruptly curtailed when complications following her mother's plastic surgery end in death. Deeply depressed, Chrysalis retreats under her bed and attempts to unravel the chaos in her mind concerning her origins and her uncertain future. Eddie, the prodigal, returns to claim his inheritance two weeks after the cremation but Chrysalis's hopes that he can enlighten her about her past are quickly dashed. The family home is to become a Tibetan Buddhist retreat and Eddie insists that Chrysalis must be its administrator. Growing up believing that their father is absent on CIA business while living with an alcoholic mother has given Chrysalis and Eddie strategies for coping, but for this new venture they need a guru. Enter Ralph, another product of a bizarre upbringing, whom Eddie has acquired on his travels. Ralph is to become the leader of the dysfunctional rich who are their prospective clientele. Meanwhile he charms Chrysalis out of her depression. The experiences of the two families are explored retrospectively and emerging truths cause even more confusion before the denouement. A mistress of snappy dialogue and coruscating wit, Sandra Newman also writes knowledgeably and sensitively about human frailty and the damage caused by casual parenting, drug abuse and misinformation. Her characters lead Technicolor lives in an amazingly complex world; close attention is needed, but the rewards for the reader are manifold. (Kirkus UK)

Life hammers in spectacularly messy fashion the adopted Third World daughter of showily dissolute Californians. Written and laid out as if its relentlessly disaffected author were unable to switch off the outlining mechanism in her word-processing software (and who among us has not suffered that terror?), Newman's supermodern tale of Chrysalis Moffat, Guatemala-born and southern-California reared, her hopelessly drug-, love-, and booze-wrecked brother Eddie, a.k.a. Jack, and Ralph, Eddie's Tibetan Buddhism savvy English potter chum clicks restlessly back and forth through their appalling histories as they huddle in the mouldering mansion bequeathed Eddie by their late mum. As we join them, Chrysalis is in the throes of near-fatal depression, hunkered under her bed, assailed by random memories of her booze-soaked mother and her long-dead John Wayne look-alike father, a scientist for the CIA who brought her back as a toddler from one of his missions in Central America. Short and dark in the Mayan fashion, Chrysalis, though intelligent, never really fit into California life, and neither of the children was enough to jerk their mother out of her dependencies on chemicals or lust for the broad-shouldered father. Eddie arrives, Ralph in tow, as Chrysalis is close to death by starvation and looniness. Eddie is full of a plan to turn the mansion into a profitable school of Buddhist life management, a reasonable business plan for that part of the country. Chrysalis immediately swoons over Ralph, the relatively levelheaded son of a Romany prostitute whose addictions at one point took her to the Himalayas, where Ralph, amazingly engineered for survival, picked up fluent Tibetan. As the meditation center comes into shaky existence, the three lives are reviewed in flashback, revealing coincidental connections among their various parents and siblings, and the truth of Chrysalis' actual parentage and the horrifying truth of her orphanage is revealed. Oh, and considerable useful information about the percentages of blackjack is shuffled in. For young hipsters who can't be bothered with coherence. (Kirkus Reviews)

1. My names is Chrysalis Moffat. 1.1 I was born in Peru. 1.2 When I was three, I was brought to the United States. 1.3 Here I was adopted by rich white people. 1.4 Insofar as that is possible, I became just like them. Writing the story of her life is not easy for Chrysalis Moffat. In fact it's so complicated that she has to resort to bullet points - but even then she is not sure whether what she has been told is true. Was Peru, for example, really the South American country that her father brought her home from? And was he really working for the CIA on biological warfare - which is what her brother Eddie seems to believe? Unfortunately, her father died when she was ten, taking the truth with him, and her alcoholic mother, Lannie, doesn't seem to have much of a clue. The world is such a confusing place that when Lannie also dies (of complications following liposuction surgery), Chrysalis thinks its safer to stay under her bed. But then fast-talking, bad brother Eddie returns home to claim the Californian mansion he has inherited and brings with him Ralph the guru, with whom he intends to start a Tibetan School of Miracles, and fleece unsuspecting, credulous Californians of their cash. Ralph isn't really a guru - he's a Scotsman who has spent a bit of time in Tibet - but it seems he might be capable of the odd miracle. He lures Chrysalis from under her bed with a regimen of early morning walks and optimism, and - with a casual reference to his half-sister Denise - uncovers a mind-blowing series of coincidences that link his family to Chrysalis's. Professional gambler Denise, it appears, holds all the cards and is the only one who can unlock the past. First novels rarely come as entertaining, intelligent and playful as this. Sandra Newman has a Tarantino-esque feel for quick-change dialogue, a love of Byzantine plotting worthy of Laurence Sterne and a wicked sense of humour. But beneath the fun and the technical fireworks lie a brilliantly subtle understanding of human nature and our philosophical dilemmas.