Did You Ever Have a Family has a lot of hype to live up to: After writing two best-selling memoirs about his years as a crack-addicted superstar literary agent, this, author Bill Clegg's first foray into fiction, created not just a bidding war but prompted Simon & Schuster to create a new imprint to feature Clegg, offering him a two book deal (worth seven figures? Eight?), and after enjoying an aggressive promotional push, this book has so far ended up on the Man Booker Prize and National Book Award longlists. So what did I find when I finally got my chance to read such a storied story? It was all right.
To start with the title, the book's epigraph excerpts a poem by Alan Shapiro that includes the line “Did you ever have a family?” (which in the acknowledgments Clegg says “planted the seed all those years ago”). It eventually comes up in the book when June – essentially the main character who is upset by some family drama – is found crying in the woods. When Pru asks June if she's okay and June replies with the title line, Pru is able to call her parents later and confide that her “answer to June's question had been a yes, but not as a commiseration, or an explanation of fatigue, as it seemed to be for June, but both as an acknowledgment of great fortune and a prayer of thanks”. Although most of the characters wouldn't feel this grateful for their relatives, eventually the book explores all different forms of families – broken, whole, single mom, childless, white trash living off their former good name, mixed race, same sex – and reveals all the ways in which our families can let us down – having a mother who tells you to grin and bear domestic violence, having a mother walk out for reasons you don't understand, having a mother choose her sketchy boyfriend over you, having parents kick you out when you come out of the closet – and in the end, makes the case that as we grow up and away from our birth families, “family” becomes the people whom we love and choose to have around us. But haven't I read that story over and over again?
That's the broad theme – which I didn't find freshly profound – and in the details, situations felt barely sketched. As the book opens, there has been a house fire that killed four people, and although this has the air of tragedy, it takes the whole book to get to know the dead and that somehow felt backward; I didn't care more about them as the details filled in. In the same way, it was curious to me that the last character to meet Lydia described her as looking like a “small-town Elizabeth Taylor” – that's such an evocative description that I wish it had come when we were first introduced to her. The story is told from multiple points of view (several from very peripheral characters, but some of these do shed the most light), and while this allows for a wide variety of experiences, it doesn't provide much depth. It also makes for a lot of blank pages (white space follows every shift) and when that is coupled with a physically small book with a largish font, this isn't a long book either. Not long not deep not fresh.
So what about the writing? It's serviceable, with few surprises. At the very beginning, we meet Silas (a fifteen-year-old pothead), who observes the morning sky after a bong hit:
The sky is pink and blue, and he traces a long trail of plane exhaust above him until it disappears over the roofline of the garage. The streaks are fluffy and loose, and so he thinks the plane must have flown over hours ago, before daybreak. To where? he wonders, the drug beginning to lozenge his thoughts.I liked that – lozenge as a verb – and I thought it presaged interesting writing to come, but what follows is totally straightforward prose (and if I knew that Silas would eventually be haunted by cloudy sky dragons every time he got high, I wouldn't have been charmed by this foreshadowing). I did like the setting in small town Connecticut – where the economy is based on the locals upkeeping the old homesteads that rich New Yorkers use as weekend homes – and I enjoyed this perspective of the local florist:
It occurred to me that night and since that we no longer live in a town, not a real one anyway. We live in a pricey museum, one that’s only open on weekends, and we are its janitors.But I don't know if I was missing something in contrasting this town to one on the west coast: we meet motel caretakers in each setting, with maids who clean the rooms the same way and owners trying to scratch out a living. But there are differences: in the east – where the unhappy/unstable families seem to be – everyone gossips and wants to be in everyone's business, while in the west, a person can anonymously occupy space. And yet – when a person in the east loses everything, she becomes a bigger target for the town gossips while on the west coast, a sympathetic stranger might drop off thermosfuls of pea soup. You can escape from the east and be found in the west. There's something bookendish about these sections/settings, but a deeper meaning escapes me.
After all the success that this represents already for Bill Clegg, he doesn't need for me to have enjoyed Did You Ever Have a Family, but I honestly don't understand the hype. This would make a great book club selection – it has appeal for a variety of interest and reading levels – and I could see it catching Oprah's attention. I don't regret reading this but at least it was short.
I don't know how (beyond the aggressive promotional push) this book made it on the Man Booker Longlist, but at least it wasn't shortlisted. Harrumph.
Man Booker Longlist 2015:
Bill Clegg - Did You Ever Have a Family
Anne Enright - The Green Road
Marlon James - A Brief History of Seven Killings
Laila Lalami - The Moor's Account
Tom McCarthy - Satin Island
Chigozie Obioma - The Fishermen
Andrew O’Hagan - The Illuminations
Marilynne Robinso - Lila
Anuradha Roy - Sleeping on Jupiter
Sunjeev Sahota - The Year of the Runaways
Anna Smaill - The Chimes
Anne Tyler - A Spool of Blue Thread
Hanya Yanagihara - A Little Life
I was really pleased that A Brief History of Seven Killings took the prize; even more pleased that it didn't go to A Little Life as seemed inevitable.
