back to their unpropitious birth to a scullery maid known only as Pretty Kitty in a boarding house on the bedraggled fringes of show business. They are adopted by the questionably respectable proprietor, Mrs. Chance, who, discovering late the joys of motherhood, gives them lots of love, dancing lessons, and a taste for unconventionality.

Part 2 chronicles their childhood and adolescence. On their seventh birthday, Grandma Chance takes them to see Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers on stage, an experience so intoxicating that they set their sights on a musical career. On the same occasion, Grandma Chance spots their father in the audience, a discovery that awakens in them an unquenchable longing for his approval and love. All this while, they are financially supported by Peregrine Hazard, their father’s twin brother, a magician and adventurer who lets on to the world that he is the girls’ natural father. When they turn thirteen, Peregrine mischievously takes them on an impromptu backstage visit to their father, who fails to acknowledge them, a failure that Dora considers “the bitterest disappointment…before or since.” At Melchior’s disavowal, Peregrine declares: “It’s a wise child that knows its own father…But wiser the father who knows his own child.”

In late adolescence, their lives take a turn for the better as they gain fleeting fame, money, and admirers. Dora loses her heart to Nora’s boyfriend, whom she persuades Nora to lend her for her sexual initiation. Although Dora really loves him, she never discloses to him the impersonation but returns him to her sister. Years later, she explains this choice. “I love her best and always have.” On their seventeenth birthday, their father partially acknowledges them by inviting them to appear with him in a musical revue based loosely on the Bard. A few years later, Melchior, rich and famous, invites them to his newly acquired manor house, which he intends to make the country home of the Royal Family of the British Theatre but which resembles “a permanent stage set.” When the house confirms its impermanence by burning down, Melchior announces that he will take all of his houseguests, including the twins, to Hollywood to make a film version of a Midsummer Night’s Dream, scripted by Peregrine Hazard, “with additional dialogue by William Shakespeare.”

Part 3 is a Hollywood extravaganza, complete with tinseled actresses, ever-hopeful starlets, and ever-predatory casting couch directors. In this world of excess in everything, all films run over schedule and budget, their fantasy scenes too realistic and their reality too fantastic. Hollywood offers the sisters their big chance, but they blow it: Nora forsakes stardom for paste and bambini with her boyfriend, Tony; Dora flees marriage to movie mogul Genghis Khan, who has designated her to bear his son and heir. In the hilariously raucous climax to this episode, the planned triple marriage of Nora to Tony, Dora to Genghis Khan, and movie star Delia Delaney (née Daisy Duck) to Melchior Hazard turns into a melee in which Tony’s Italian mother reclaims her erring son, Dora reworks the Shakespearean “‘substitute bride’ bit” to marry Genghis to his pining former spouse disguised as Dora, and Delia and Melchior run off to two months of marital misery before landing in divorce court.

The twins return to England as “sadder and wiser girls,” but with their radical innocence and essential goodness miraculously intact. Part 4 underscores the sourness of their return to a home and family in which they remain outsiders. Invited to the twenty-first birthday celebration of Melchior’s legitimate twin daughters, Saskia and Imogen, Dora and Nora see themselves permanently outcast and unloved as both Melchior and Peregrine dote upon the legitimate twins who, like the evil sisters of a folktale, return love with cruelty and ingratitude.

At the nadir of their fortunes, dismayed at the reported suicide of their spurned and pregnant goddaughter Tiffany, they receive an invitation to the one hundredth birthday party of Melchior Hazard, to which they determine to go. Defiantly arrayed in garish finery, with Melchior’s first wife in tow, they arrive at Melchior’s mansion on the right side of the Thames. The sedate festivities are interrupted by a series of escalating crises, among them Wheelchair’s confession to Melchior that Saskia and Imogen are Peregrine’s daughters, not his, and Saskia’s attempt to get rid of her father by slipping poison into his birthday cake. When everything that could possibly go wrong has done so, the family’s ill fortunes are reversed by a series of wild surprises. Peregrine returns from the jungles of South America bearing remarkable gifts that fulfill the twins’ deepest desires, Tiffany reappears (very much alive), Wheelchair’s evil daughters make amends, and the party culminates in a scene of “laughter, forgiveness, generosity, reconciliation” that exceeds even the joyous conclusions of Shakespearean comedy.

Amid its improbable events and comic exuberance, the book considers several serious issues. One of these is the relationship between fathers and children, and the meaning of family in general. While tweaking patriarchal culture for spotlighting fathers and ignoring mothers, the book demonstrates the determining influence of forebears and the need for children to acknowledge connection with them, however great their weaknesses and foibles; and to try to understand them, if only as the products of their own parents. An attendant, more subversive theme is the allure of incest: all Lears wish to marry their Cordelias (and in the Hazard family, they do); and the most enduring sexual connections are forbidden ones, Dora and Peregrine’s, for example. Equally subversive is the book’s definition of a family as a unit of desire rather than of legality. “[H]owever randomly we’d been assembled, we were all family,” Dora asserts. According to this conception, there is no such thing as legitimacy or illegitimacy. Families can comprise the unlikeliest conjunctions of people. Their only tie is an affection that cannot be summoned by law, only freely given.

Another of the book’s central concerns is the relationship between illusion and reality. In every contest between them, illusion is the victor. The overriding power of illusion is symbolized in Melchior’s pasteboard crown, his most prized possession, which he carries with him throughout his stage career. Originally devised by Melchior’s actress mother as a last-minute substitute in his father’s touring King Lear, the crown not only embodies the inherently valueless ingredients that get transformed into art but the power of art to transcend the shoddy and to compel belief. When Melchior’s manor house burns down, it is the crown alone that he is desperate to save, and Melchior’s centenary birthday festivities end fittingly with Nora and Dora placing the crown upon his head, confirming his unassailable position as king of make-believe.

Nor is the power of illusion confined to high art. It holds sway equally in the world of vaudeville, musical comedy, and popular song. One of the points of the book is that art, high and low (the book erases the distinction between them), suffuses and shapes our lives. In fact, Dora’s language—the language of the book’s narrative—is a pastiche of cultural tags, echoes of Shakespeare, lines from popular songs, references to folktales, advertisements, and film dialogue. “Strange how potent cheap music is,” Melchior comments, quoting Noel Coward. This is in fact one of the book’s general observations.

As the book treats the theme of illusion, it calls attention to its own narrative. In fact, this playful self-reflection is one of its distinguishing characteristics:

Hard to swallow, huh?

Well, you might have known what you were about to let yourself in for when you let Dora Chance in her ratty old fur and poster paint, her orange (Persian Melon) toenails sticking out of her snakeskin peep-toes, reeking of liquor, accost you in the Coach and Horses and let her tell you a tale.

Repeatedly, the narrative points out its determination to present comedy, not tragedy. it therefore excludes any events that “do not belong to the world of comedy.” Of the harshness of the war, the narrator maintains, “I have my memories, but I prefer to keep them to myself, thank you very much.” Of the possibility of an apocalyptic ending: “But such was not to be. There are limits to the power of laughter and though I may hint at them from time to time, I do not propose to step over them.” As a result, the book is relentlessly, almost remorselessly, cheerful. Through its conscious manipulation, the book demonstrates that the difference between comedy and tragedy lies not in subject matter but in treatment. Or, in the words of the book, “Comedy is tragedy that happens to other people.” Never does the book more clearly reveal its power than when it confesses its self-imposed limitations, for despite the constant reminder of its artifice, the narrative is so joyful and its optimism so compelling that the reader again and again suspends disbelief. By repeatedly exhorting the reader to look on the bright side, however, the narrative continually evokes the dark if hidden side of things. At this moment, the books seems to say, comedy is center stage, but tragedy is always waiting in the wings.

Sources for Further Study

Belles Lettres. VII, Summer, 1992, p. 57.

Chicago Tribune. December 19, 1991, V, p. 3.

Los Angeles Times Book Review. January 5, 1992, p. 3.

The Nation. CCLIV, April 20, 1992, p. 526.

The New York Review of Books. XXXIX, April 23, 1992, p. 9.

The New York Times Book Review. XCVII, January 19, 1992, p. 7.

Review of Contemporary Fiction. XII, Summer, 1992, p. 195.

The Times Literary Supplement. December 13, 1991, p. 12.

The Wall Street Journal. January 22, 1992, p. A12.