In the following review, Wood praises McDermott's matter-of-fact depiction of love in A Bigamist's Daughter, but maintains that her secondary characters are underdeveloped.
SOURCE: A review of A Bigamist's Daughter, in West Coast Review of Books, Vol. 8, No. 2, April, 1982, p. 35.
[In A Bigamist's Daughter] Elizabeth Connelly, editor-in chief of Vista Books, a vanity press, is the bigamist's daughter. Her interest in her father's bigamy becomes agitated by the appearance of Tupper Daniels, a southern novelist who has written a book about a bigamist in his hometown. Daniels' book has no ending, without which Elizabeth has no sales contract. Sensing their mutual needs and concerns, they become lovers; his interest in her father, a deceased travelling salesman, piques her own untapped curiosity and together they return to her roots on Long Island to discover more.
Daniels believes his book will be successful because "almost every woman has had a bigamist figure in her life." Elizabeth has had two: her father and her ex-lover Bill who has left her to return to his wife. Daniels' book will show the Elizabeths of the world "that their love for him (the bigamist) was noble and his leaving nothing personal. It will offer them a hope of his return."
An excerpt from A Bigamist's Daughter
"What did he look like, your father?"
She brushes back her hair. "Dark hair, like mine. Blue eyes, like mine. My nose exactly, I'm told. But his face was thinner and he had a mustache. A small one, like Clark Gable's."
"Was he tall?"
"Yes," she says. "And thin. Why are you so interested?"
He shrugs, rests his glass on his stomach. "I don't know; you get kind of defensive when you talk about him. I don't think you liked him."
"I was crazy about him," she cries. "I lived for the days he came home. Honestly, I think he spoiled me for any other man."
"Is that why you're not married?"
She laughs. "Could be. He's as good an excuse as any. If I need an excuse."
"There could be a correlation," he says, seriously. "If your father represented impermanence, then anyone who wanted to marry you would mean permanence, just the opposite."
"Very good, Mr. Freud," she says dryly, although, suddenly, her stomach is dancing, as if she were a child again, playing hide-and-seek, hiding in someone's dark, cool basement, feeling the searcher come near, stop, turn, walk away, and then walk back. "But not very original."
"No," he says, refusing to joke. "You should think about that. I should think about it too, if I'm going to get involved with you. I always look at a woman's father; it's usually a good indication of how she feels about men."
"Jesus," she says, laughing. "Do you want a character reference too? Birth certificate? Fingerprints?" She doesn't tell him that his basic premise, that they are to get "involved," is his first mistake.
"You see," he says calmly, pointing at her. "You get touchy when you talk about your father, even though you say you liked him. And you called him a bigamist."
"I was joking." Her voice is higher than she wants it to be. Sounds touchy.
"Yes, but you see," he says, "if you don't like your father, then it says something to me about how you feel about men like him."
Alice McDermott, in her A Bigamist's Daughter, Perennial Library, 1988.
In the end it is Elizabeth who is a bigamist. She leaves Daniels hanging and becomes a travelling editor for Vista. Her attitude is a page out of his book: there is nothing personal about this. She never develops anything personal for Daniels, he was merely a sharp corner to scratch her sexual and mental itching. Author McDermott's other characters serve as fillers. Elizabeth's father was a shadow, her mother a mystery, and her friends are props to bounce off of. This is the author's first novel and it is a very good one. The only flaws lie in her characterization.
