Wise Children. Oh, why did it take me so long to read this? Books like this one, sitting on my shelves gathering dust because I once thought they sounded interesting enough to buy, but then never got around to reading them, are exactly why I am undertaking this project and reading the books that I have instead of buying anything new.

I loved this book a lot, obviously. It’s the kind of book I want to read again for fun, but it also makes me want to go back to school, to read or reread all of Shakespeare (I am limiting myself to The Winter’s Tale for now), to go back and read some Bakhtin.

This is a novel about the theater, about the romance of family (blood ties and created families alike), about fathers and daughters, about the “hypothesis” of fatherhood and the effects of its denial, about Shakespeare, about bastard children and lost heirs and endless sets of twins (I think there are five sets of twins, all told). Dora Chance, an identical twin and a bastard child and an elderly woman, looks back on her life as a song-and-dance girl on the wrong side of a great theater family that has fallen on hard times, artistically speaking: they now do margarine commercials, game shows, and cooking shows. Shakespearean plots and illusions repeat all through the novel and are sometimes consciously evoked by Dora, and sometimes appear under the surface.

The story is nominally about fathers and daughters and the claiming of paternity, right down to the title: the proverb reads, “It is a wise child that knows its own father,” but Shakespeare turned it around to, “It is a wise father that knows his own child,” in The Merchant of Venice, and in this novel the knowing and not knowing definitely goes hand in hand with wisdom, on both sides of the parental equation. And Carter opens the novel with a quotation: “How many times Shakespeare draws fathers and daughters, never mothers and daughters.”

But I think the novel is about mothers. The absent mother, dead in childbirth or murdered by the father, the adopted caretakers, the grandmothers, the stepmothers, the nanny. Fathers are both larger than life and entirely elusive here, but mothers are everywhere. They crawl out of the woodwork to fill in the gaps Shakespeare left, while the “wise children” are so focused on fathers that they take for granted the mothers all around them. A quote from near the end:

‘Nora … don’t you think our father looked two-dimensional, tonight?’

She gave me a look that said, tell me more.

‘Too kind, too handsome, too repentant. After all those years without a word. Remember that terrible bank holiday when he pretended to our faces that he thought we were Perry’s? And tonight, he had an imitation look, even when he was crying, especially when he was crying, like one of those great, big, papier-maché heads they have in the Notting Hill parade, larger than life, but not lifelike.’

Nora sunk in thought for a hundred yards.

‘D’you know, I sometimes wonder if we haven’t been making him up all along,’ she said. ‘If he isn’t just a collection of our hopes and dreams and wishful thinking in the afternoons. Something to set our lives by, like the old clock in the hall, which is real enough, in itself, but which we’ve got to wind up to make it go.’

And on top of all of that, Wise Children is raunchy and very, very funny. I loved it without a single reservation.