Female Ruins

Library Journal

The most compelling voice in this novel belongs to an offstage character, would-be architect and notable architectural critic Christopher Howell, whose death has occurred years before the novel opens. The principal characters are Howell's daughter Kelly, an English taxi driver, and Jack Dexter, a Howell groupie who has just arrived in England on holiday. In order to hire Kelly and get the goods on her father, Dexter uses a subterfuge, posing as an injured tourist seeking a driver to show him the local sights. Unsuspecting Kelly has long been haunted by her father's fame and his unfulfilled promise. Their wanderings take them, first, around Sussex to look at various architectural ruins and, later, after Dexter's cover is blown, to Los Angeles, where Dexter has a surprise waiting for Kelly. This entertaining read is enlivened by scattered riffs on architecture by Howell himself. It is likely to find a happy home on most public library shelves.--Barbara Love, Kingston Frontenac P.L., Kingston, ON Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\

Matthew Klam

eoff Nicholson's 12th novel is an elegantly constructed and often funny story about a man, a woman and her famous dead father, Christopher Howell, known as ''the greatest modern English architect never to have built a building.'' Female Ruins -- a daughter's homage to her father's unrealized dreams -- so beautifully evokes her attempt to fathom him that Nicholson might have called it ''What's Poppa?'' or ''Don't Give Me That Architectural Genius Stuff, I'm His Daughter.''
—The New York Times Book Review

Chris Jones

For all the prestige afforded the profession of architecture, its fictional proponents are usually either raving egomaniacs or ineffectual, dreamy insouciants. And in the time-honored tradition of Henrik Ibsen's The Masterbuilder and Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, Nicholson's Christopher Howell is yet another professional poster child for social dysfunction. An offbeat English architect who wrote brilliant theoretical essays, attracted a cult following and apparently built no buildings whatsoever, the fictional character of Howell is dead long before Nicholson picks up the tale of Kelly Howell, embittered architect's daughter turned rural minicab driver. But it's the vividly drawn dead character who dominates the book, even as Jack Dexter, a young American follower of his work, tries to get close to his hero's adult daughter and help her unlock the complexities of her wacky, lousy father. Although excerpts of Howell's writing pepper the compelling main narrative in Nicholson's trademark off-kilter style, the novel lacks the startling stylistic invention of the author's superb Flesh Guitar. And there are moments when Kelly's anti-intellectual lethargy does not quite jell with Nicholson's narrative need to obsess about Dad's heady ideas. But assuming you can swallow the blending of architectural theory with populist psychotherapy, this unusual novel is a gripping tale with potent ideas that linger long in the mind.

Kirkus Reviews

From Nicholson (Flesh Guitar, 1998, etc.), a comic cross-cultural romance mixed with a droll consideration of architectural aesthetics suggests that ruins—human and monumental—can be beautiful. Kelly Howell, a British taxi driver, is "ruined" because she's not pursuing her genetic potential: her father was the late Christopher Howell, architecture's most celebrated failure, a cult hero though he completed only one building. Into Kelly's life now comes Jack Dexter, a Californian who himself appears a bit of a ruin—limping, drinking, complaining. The couple's initial relationship is professional: Dexter hires Kelly to guide him around England as he gathers impressions and, inadvertently, offends his guide's British propriety, the plot beginning to turn on the romantic tension between this contrasting pair. She is a ruin, he is a fixer. Although the revelation of the true reason for Dexter's visit provides an effective twist for which the groundwork has been carefully laid, getting there proves more intriguing than does arriving on a trip that will show readers an on-going discrepancy between the story's emotionally cool tone and its deeper ambition. In the course of events, an old man is brutally beaten, and a menacing, unstable drifter burns to death, violent acts that are curiously undisturbing in the context of an otherwise droll, entertaining narrative. Kelly, the central consciousness, remains something of an enigma, as does Dexter, for that matter, who disappears from the story at a crucial point. To paraphrase the author's words (applied to a different object), there's a chilly, masculine emptiness about the prosedespiteits elegance. Funny, provocative essays by the dead architect father, interpolated into the text in an irregular pattern, fail to illuminate the characters fully, though they do enrich our sense of the environments around us. A fun, fast read with a rich premise that ultimately fails to pay off.