Family Album / by Penelope Lively

UK author Penelope Lively won the Man-Booker award for her riveting 1987 novel Moon Tiger about a globe-trotting woman's conflicted love affairs during the middle of the twentieth century. Known for telling stories through multiple points of view, her fiction predominately focuses on domestic spheres, most specifically families and small, concentrated social networks. Her latest book Family Album visits a sprawling family of six-children, all visibly well-adjusted but internally troubled and mutually encumbered by life's problems.
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Alison Harper is one of those women who's always wanted a large family. Something of a throwback, she thinks, to an era many years ago when large families of six or more children were the norm and everyone did things together (i.e., meals, housework, birthday parties, picnics, etc.) is her ideal. Reality isn't far from her dream actually. It's at Allersmead, their sprawling country estate highlighted by an old but spacious house, that Alison and husband Charles, a writer of obscure non-fiction books, live with their six children--two boys and four girls--and an au paire housekeeper, Ingrid. Things are nice from the outside looking in. Yet despite an external facade which fronts a flourishing home life, blissful childhoods for each of her kids and a happy marriage, Alison is being torn apart by the stress of a world beyond her control--one which can't hide her own violent emotional outbursts, shady secrets ongoing behind her back, and Charles' increasing emotional indifference.

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All the children are normal by relative standards, and even amiable toward one another, but problems are evident early on. Paul, the oldest, is something of a disappointment to his father who views his son's rebellious streak, poor academic record and experimental drug use with utter disdain and cool derision, a trend only furthering Paul's dissent into a problematic adulthood. And while the remaining siblings--the middle three girls Gina, Sandra and Clare followed by Roger and Katie, the youngest--are successful in their endeavours, few remain close as time passes, each choosing life outside the family sphere. Gina, Clare and Katie, foreign correspondent, professional dancer and teacher respectively, remain far away from Allersmead until each, not totally by their own choosing, return decades later. The beautiful Sandra lives abroad in the world of modelling and fashion design, always with a steady parade of male companions while Roger, a doctor, is now a continent away in Toronto. All have remained childless.

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Lively is good at depicting normal stuff, which is not-so-happy and unhappy stuff more often than not though at least truthful and accurate in many cases. Through the minds of each family member at various times ranging from the early years in the late 1970's to the present, multiple points of view are presented filling the reader in on the untidy bits of the family's existence. This manner of burrowing beneath the surface reveals the messy, unpleasant and even disappointing episodes in the family's tenure to go along with a smaller but still evident portion of jubilant times, but it's not as if the chiefly damaging issues are horribly scandalous or grossly disturbing. The Harpers, though not a terribly close-knit or even an especially loving modern clan, reflect the problems inherent in life at large, a vision Lively extraordinarily evokes in uniquely provocative and starkly compelling fashion. (FIC LIVELY)