Deep Down True / by Juliette Fay

Homemaker Dana Stellgarten has a tendency to be a little too nice. Consequently people, even the ones she loves, take advantage of her open, companionable nature and generosity, something which seems especially evident now at a particularly volatile time in her life. Her husband Kenneth recently left her for another, younger woman and now she and her two kids--Morgan, 12, and Grady, 7--have to get by on the meager monthly alimony checks. When Dana's teenage niece Alder shows up on the front door, wanting to move in after another falling out with her mom, it seems things can't get any worse. They do though. Before long, Dana learns that her daughter (only a sixth grader) is bulimic and Grady, whom she knows has been deeply wounded by the divorce (but how deeply?), has been fighting and causing trouble in school. Alder too, still sleeping on the couch a month after her arrival, has something going on which Dana suspects may not be entirely respectable. And what is she going to do now that her ex-husband's just told her that he's working at half his normal salary? A weaker mother might be reeling from the seemingly endless succession of woes but strangely, with Dana, that's not the case at all.

When Juliette Fay's debut novel Shelter Me, published in 2009, managed to distinguish itself from the other, always endless proliferation of domestic fiction novels, many readers and critics chalked it up as a one-hit wonder. It wasn't. With the same effortless storytelling of Anna Quindlen and the striking familiar-ness of Elizabeth Berg, Fay's Deep Down True attracts the reader with a welcomed magnetism, managing to do what so many other similarly written novels can't avoid: lose the interest of the reader mid-way through leaving the anticlimactic conclusion just that--a disappointing anti-climax. Dana as a character is both sympathetic but flawed, limited yet capable, thoroughly revealing that the disproportionate amoung of careless offenses and injuries tossed her way are very much felt and internalized like anyone else would feel them. There's a curious, yet entirely accurate, way in which Dana is affected by and reacts to her life circumstances. She's subjected to the very same social threshing floor her kids are confronted by, misled by her own judgments, plagued by her desire for acceptance and inept at expressing her emotions. And quite a bit of the book is devoted to just the type of extremely uncomfortable emotional navigation faced by people at all levels, a world of untrustworthy peers and awakened sensitivities which, as Fay is so apt at detailing, changes little with age. As it follows through very well on the world seen through Dana's eyes, the novel conveys a colorful portrait of an imperfect yet not despairing, broken-hearted yet willing-to-work-at-it character who grows up a little in her own way right alongside her kids. (FIC FAY)

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.
.

.

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.

.

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.

.

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)