Good Family

written by Terry Gamble

Wow, I've read two books inside of two weeks. You can tell I've been on vacation!

This book is billed as fiction, but you definitely get the sense that many elements of it are autobiographical. It's about a wealthy, WASP-y family steeped in old money, and the story is told by the adult daughter of the dying matriarch. The setting is a sprawling "summer cottage" (read: mansion) on an island in northern Lake Michigan, where the matriarch's daughters and an assortment of other relatives are gathered to see her through her final days.

Though the locale is fictional, any midwestern reader will picture Mackinac Island right away. The island has large, Victorian-style homes, a quaint historic downtown, and no automobiles are allowed. The author, I found out later, has a lot in common with the protagonist: she grew up in California but spent her summers at a family beach house on Lake Michigan. This novel grew out of her experience of losing her mother under circumstances similar to what's described in this story.

There isn't a ton of action in this book, and at times I wished the dying mother would just die already. The whole ordeal seems to kind of drag on and on. But even though the mother's looming death feels a bit wearisome, it does give the author a good backdrop for unfolding a really well-done character study. You get a vivid peek into the past of the daughter, Maddie, who, despite her privileged upbringing, has endured a lot of pain and dysfunction, including alcoholism, a failed marriage, loss of a child, and some really out-there family relationships. You also get a candid view of some of the kooky aunts, uncles, cousins, etc.

If your family is anything like mine, you'll recognize some of the experiences and character traits in the stories the author tells. In fact, the book reminded me in some ways of the movie The Family Stone, which also portrays some archetypical characters and relationships.

It was really helpful to have a chart of the family tree at the front of the book, just because some of the characters seemed to run together in my mind.

Overall, it's not a bad summer read. Despite some of the kind of depressing themes, I think Gamble is a really talented writer, and I felt quite drawn in by her portrayal of individual characters.

The Dogs of Babel

written by Carolyn Parkhurst

This tale is of a university professor and linguist named Paul Iverson who marries a quirky, artsy woman nine years his junior and who loses her, tragically, under mysterious circumstances. He comes home from work one day to find his wife dead in the back yard, at the base of an apple tree. No witnesses - not even neighbors or passersby - have any clues as to what happened, and only the couple's dog, Lorelei, was present at the time of death. Iverson finds himself on a desperate mission to tap into the dog's knowledge of what happened, and he takes a sabbatical from his job in order to teach Lorelei to communicate. The story follows him through months of reclusive research, encounters with a psychic hotline, and a brush with a criminal and cult-like subculture that performs bizarre and cruel surgeries on dogs to teach them to talk.

It sounds kind of weird, and it is, but overall it's actually not a bad novel. The wife is a heartbreaking but fascinating character who is brilliantly creative and spontaneous, and who apparently suffers from depression and maybe some sort of mood disorder. I wonder if the author had some exposure to someone like Lexy in real life. It is painful to read at times - I guess more so if you have known anyone with depressive tendencies or if you've ever (spoiler warning) lost anyone to suicide.

One piece that I thought was really artfully done was the parallel plot of Lexy's career: she happens to be an artist who specializes in making sculpted masks, and throughout the book, her work is often expressive of some of the tensions and struggles she is battling. Another thing I appreciated about the book is that it does not have a tidy, buttoned-up ending. It is sad and haunting and makes you think. On the down side (and yes, I know I'm no Jane Austen), parts of the novel seemed a little amateurish. The psychic hotline stuff was just hokey. And the characters in the dog-maiming cult were very cliche and not well developed. The biggest thing that bothered me, though, was that you find out in the last 75 pages or so that the husband knew a critical piece of information early on, which wasn't shared with the reader but would've made the reader feel completely different about the entire story. That felt manipulative and to me, and it really cheapened the story to almost a dime-store-level.

Still, the book was a good read-in-the-car book on the way to Maryland; it certainly beats looking out the window at Ohio for two and a half hours.

A Girl Named Zippy

written by Haven Kimmel

Haven Kimmel is a most excellent storyteller. She takes what you might otherwise consider a disjointed jumble of memories about growing up in a podunk Indiana town, and spins them into one of the funniest books I've read in a long time.

I'm not usually that into memoirs, but part of what's so appealing here is that I can relate to some of her childhood experiences. Like Zippy, I grew up in the midwest in the early 1970s, lived in a very small town (still live there, in fact), and was (am) the baby of the family. But even if the genre of thirtysomething midwestern women reflecting on childhood doesn't float your boat, I'm betting you will like this book. It's really funny stuff.

One evening after dinner, I actually read a few pages of this book out loud to my kids and their cousins, because it was just too funny not to share. I won't give away the punchline, but it involved a crazy story about Zippy eating a shocking number of raw carrots (because her mom had - gasp - taken a job outside the home and Zippy was forced to forage for a snack while her mom was at work). The ensuing aftermath was awful and hilarious at the same time.

An interesting wrinkle is that some of the things Zippy writes about are kind of disturbing. For example, she casually observes that there are never family dinner times in her house, that the house is always filthy and has little or no food in it, that her dad sometimes disappears for hours or days with no explanation, and that her mother sits on the couch for days on end, reading science fiction. One can assume from reading this book that Zippy's dad was something of an alcoholic and compulsive gambler, and her mom suffered from bouts of depression, so the homefront was not always blissful — yet all this is presented quite matter-of-factly, even humorously, not in a life-stopping, psychosis-bending, pity-me-because-my-family's-dysfunctional sort of way. I like that, not because I think that family problems should be minimized or swept under the rug, but because all of us (yes, even wholesome midwesterners) can point to a fair bit of dysfunction in our upbringing. But unlike some of the other chick lit out there, Kimmel's memoir doesn't let these darker points define her childhood; they're merely there as part of the fabric.

My friend Lisa, who also read this book, told me that Kimmel has written a follow-on memoir about her mom, called She Got Up Off the Couch - and Other Heroic Acts from Moreland, Indiana. I'll have to check that out.