‘Family Album’ a small but vast diary of dysfunction

The family members coming together at the start of this short novel couldn’t be more different. Four daughters, two sons, two parents, and an au pair, Ingrid, who has become a member of the family, have all gathered to celebrate the parents’ 25th anniversary, bringing with them an equally odd assortment of mates.

These adult children have little in common, except their shared history in Allersmead. Only one, Paul, still lives in the family home. In classic failure-to-launch mode, he nominally holds a job at a local gardening center, but his history of troubles - with the law, with drugs - haunts him. Meanwhile, Gina, who is accompanied by her new boyfriend, Phil, is an urbane TV news anchor, concerned with the world, while her sister Sandra has devoted her life to the glitzy materialism of fashion and property. The remaining sibs - Roger, Katie, and Clare - have scattered into equally separate lives with very different interests. Only one is trying to start a family, and all feel great ambivalence about Allersmead and about their return. That their parents - the earth-motherly Alison and the distant Charles - do not really have a marriage that should be celebrated adds to the strangeness of the occasion.

The shadow overhanging the anniversary brings up other dark secrets. There had been an accident - or, perhaps something worse - at Gina’s eighth birthday party, for example, resulting in a hospitalization and the filling in of the small pond out back. There was the time that someone cut up Charles’s nearly finished manuscript. While many of the tensions reverberating around the big, old house remain, by the book’s end, some are at least explained - sometimes by the characters involved, sometimes by the siblings who looked on, wondered, and remembered.