Billionaire’s bequest short-changes readers

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This article was published 20/04/2024 (833 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Montreal-based Joanna Goodman’s sixth novel features a widowed mom of three who’s been waiting for a long-denied inheritance.

Just as Goodman’s heroine has been disappointed in waiting for her cut, Goodman’s fans may be disappointed after waiting for the novel The Inheritance.

Goodman is best-known for her 2018 novel The Home For Unwanted Girls, a compelling work of historical fiction set in 1950s Quebec.

Girls explored the tragedy of the DuPlessis orphans, vulnerable children falsely diagnosed as intellectually disabled and institutionalized to steal subsidies from the federal government.

While Girls and Goodman’s other works of historical fiction told powerful stories set in important eras in Canadian history, her contemporary fiction is less satisfying, including her latest.

The Inheritance is unfortunately predictable, with a slow-moving plot, dull characters and bland prose that drain it of most life.

The story opens in contemporary Toronto.

Thirty-eight-year-old Arden Moore is desperate. She’s spent the past year and a half grieving for her husband, comforting her three fatherless children and trying to pay bills on her small income.

Arden’s also angry at the position her husband left them in.

As she puts it, “He was always reassuring her, with the blithe arrogance of a successful Bay Street broker, that there was more than enough to go around… In the end, he left Arden with significant debt, an unfinished home, and no college nest egg for the children.”

Then Arden receives an unexpected call from an estate lawyer in New York City offering her a chance at security thanks to her late father, billionaire Wallace Ashworth.

As an illegitimate and unacknowledged child, Arden thought her chance to inherit anything was settled years ago, but science and estate law have caught up.

Now, Arden has the chance to either win big or dig herself deeper into debt for nothing.

The narrative shifts between Arden, as she balances her family’s needs with her increasingly demanding legal case, and her mother Virginia’s recounting of her affair with Wallace and present-day recovery from a date rape.

Neither character is particularly likable. Arden is passive and entitled, as she admits when recalling how she was never interested in education or a career:

“Maybe Arden inadvertently absorbed that the money would one day be hers, so she didn’t have to try too hard at anything else,” Goodman writes.

Virginia is more colourful but comes across as over-the-top, like one of the eccentric mothers-in-law from a Jennifer Weiner novel.

The novel attempts big themes such as family ties, grief, the toxicity of wealth and even elder abuse.

However, Goodman gives most themes only brief attention before pushing them aside.

Perhaps timing is the real downfall of The Inheritance.

In a time when the cost of groceries, housing and, well, everything else is rising, it’s hard to sympathize with a main character who complains about money, while barely cutting costs and still managing to hire a pricy New York lawyer to fight for millions of dollars.

Kathryne Cardwell is a writer and settler in Treaty One Territory who wishes she was eligible for a big inheritance.