I made rather heavy weather of this novel, Jessica Anderson's sixth and the one with which she won the Miles Franklin Award for the second time in 1980. I was expecting it to be as good as Tirra Lirra by the River which had also won the Miles Franklin, in 1978. But for most of Part One The Impersonators is a confusing and somewhat lifeless story of competitors for an inheritance, and I wondered why, in the year that published Elizabeth Jolley's remarkable Palomino, the Miles Franklin judges chose it. (Had they used today's more expansive interpretation of Miles Franklin's terms of her bequest, the judges might well have chosen Shirley Hazzard's brilliant The Transit of Venus, which as Charlotte Wood writes in her essay at the Sydney Review of Books, is a novel exploring Australianness, despite being set almost entirely in Europe and America.)

I wondered what else was on the shortlist. There are no records prior to 1987 so we don't know. Consulting Wikipedia's list of notable Australian books published in 1980 to make an educated guess turned out to be fruitless, since it includes only four titles: The Impersonators, The Transit of Venus, Palomino and The Dying Trade by Peter Corris, which is a crime novel.

Published as The Only Daughter in the US, The Impersonators concerns Sylvie, who like her creator, has spent some years in London. She is the only daughter of Jack Cornock and by coincidence has come back from her love affair with Europe just at the time that Jack has had a stroke and is expected to die. Why she, and not her brother Stewart (a real estate agent) is the subject of speculation about getting all his money is a mystery I failed to solve.

Sylvie is not actually interested in money. She is content to live a simple life as a teacher of Italian in order to spent half the year travelling. But other members of the family do need an injection of cash. Jack married twice. His first wife Molly, is a tedious, ignorant woman who lets her second husband Ken bully her about her spending habits and is still so aggrieved by the divorce that she never mentions Jack's second wife by name. She wants Sylvie to get the lot at the expense of Greta, the second wife who brought four children to the marriage after the death of her husband 31 years ago. These four children are unlikeable, with the possible exception of Harry, Greta's oldest child, who wastes no time in launching a relationship with Sylvie. He's divorced, and so is she, but still, it seems mildly incestuous, even though there is no blood relationship between the two.

(There is a family tree depicting the relationship between Jack's two families, and just as well because I kept needing to refer to it.)

Rosamund, Greta's second child, is married to Ted Kitching, whose business is failing. She is loyal and supportive until she learns that he is not only a crook, but an unrepentant one who will emerge unscathed while the shareholders lose everything.

Greta's third child Hermione is married to Steven Fyfe, and is obsessed by Sydney real estate. She wastes a lot of Stewart's time looking at expensive houses they can't afford. For those of us who've never paid any attention to the petty snobberies of Sydney postcodes this preoccupation is a bit arcane.

Guy, in his early thirties, was a charming child who's become a boor.

These children all want Sylvie to sweet-talk her father into making compassionate provision for Greta, because of course, they will eventually inherit from her.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2021/03/13/the-impersonators-by-jessica-anderson/ ( )

At the beginning of the book Jack Cornock is dying; mid-way through he is dead, leaving a widow, a former wife, and a number of adult children. Sylvia, a product of the first marriage, has returned from teaching in Europe to live (perhaps temporarily) in Sydney of the 1970s, which seen throgh her eyes is a dull and unsatisfactory sort of place.

In the end, it's about money and inheritance. The characters are nicely drawn. But in the end I found it all a bit bland. ( )

Part of book project. Family novel. Spoiler Alert:
This was readable. I don't know how believable. The sister who was going to run off with the stepbrother because he is rich but didn't because she met his horrible mother? Most of the characters were pretty much on the surface. One thing that bothered me is that practically on the last page she talks about Greta (the widow) and says "she presented unlikely ground for the regeneration that would become apparent in a few months time, and would take such an unexpected form." But that's all she says, what is the point of saying that, I don't get it? Unless there is a sequel....

http://gr4c5.wordpress.com/2006/11/27/only-daughter/ ( )