Revenges

Ronald Fraser

  • Gorbals Voices, Siren Songs by Ralph Glasser
    Chatto, 209 pp, £13.95, April 1990, ISBN 0 7011 3445 3
  • A Place for Us by Nicholas Gage
    Bantam, 419 pp, £14.95, February 1990, ISBN 0 593 01515 0
  • The Hidden Damage by James Stern
    Chelsea, 372 pp, £17.95, February 1990, ISBN 1 871484 01 4

Ralph Glasser’s and Nicholas Gage’s latest autobiographical instalments find their authors making good in their countries of adoption, England and the US respectively. The cost to each of their ascent from exceedingly harsh social beginnings has been different, but in ways that are not surprising: in England the struggle centred on class, in the US on money. Not that class and money are separable in either country, only that their precedence is reversed. Class – learning the codes of Oxbridge language and conduct – opened the gates to Glasser’s professional future, while in the US Gage had first to accumulate the money to get a university education before entering the ranks of the middle classes.

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