‘Every Happy Family’ by Dede Crane

Reviewed by Brett Josef Grubisic (published May 13, 2013)

Whatever the truth of “the family” might be, writers—of novels and short stories, stage plays and single-camera setup TV scripts, big screen dramas and holiday/wedding reunion comedies—see in its infinite possibility a subject with universal appeal and an eternal, heart-stimulating bounty that, ever-polymorphous, readjusts with each successive generation.

And, as always, there’s the innate complexity of family and its alluring duality: the protective facade of rigorously maintained appearance and the telltale, vulnerable interior dynamic to be anatomized, categorized, interpreted, and of course displayed for the public. The good news: whether we like our household dramas angry but tentatively optimistic (Marion Bridge) or despairing and blackly comic (August: Osage County), our novels mournful yet life-affirming (The Wise and Foolish Virgins) or national pulse-taking (The Corrections), and our films disturbing (Celebration) or farcical and ultimately joyful (Crazy, Stupid, Love), there’s a family for that.

Which is not to claim that all fictional families are created equal. For every awe-inspiring depiction of a post-peak family—meet the Lears, the Prozorovs, the Lomans—there are, for example, dozens of formulaic Lifetime or Hallmark channel-style productions—in the cookie-cutter Hitched for the Holidays and issue-of-the-week My Stepson, My Lover molds—in which the mere fact of a family is an easy and convenient starting point for writers and viewers alike, a familiar setting that guarantees nothing except passable but single-note entertainment and a slot of the programming schedule filled in on budget.

Marooned on the thorny middle ground between engrossing literary families and unmemorable ones, the Wrights of Dede Crane’s first novel, Every Happy Family, suffer a strange fate: being contained within a tale of serial crises that appears to have little impetus for creating an exploration of the implications or consequences of that surfeit of bad luck and poor choices. While reading and musing on Crane’s novel, I also questioned my surprising lack of involvement with the family’s numerous dramas and realized the story consistently struck me as a promising play still in the workshop phase.

Crane’s starting point seems to hinge on a basic but hardly newsworthy family-related premise: below surface calm, a family is an evolving complex of fiery relationships and competing interests. Crane’s strategy for the development of this starting idea, though, is questionable, since she simultaneously attempts too much while opting against earnestly delving into the very circumstances she introduces.

Every Happy Family focuses, play-like, on one modern family of five. Much of the unfolding occurs in or near the Wright home in Fairfield, an idyllic middle-class neighbourhood in Crane’s current place of residence, Victoria. Unlike the Toronto of Don Gillmor’s Mount Pleasant or the Saskatoon of Annette Lapointe’s Whitetail Shooting Gallery, however, Crane does not make Victoria itself (a city of intriguing overlaps: a tourism-reliant seat of government, a university town and retirees’ haven, and a West Coast hub at its dread-haired, pot-smoking best) character-like or a pertinent context, leaving it instead as a pretty but more or less generic backdrop to the family’s circumstances.

Crane introduces the characters and their key problems in rapid succession: university student Quinn is shy and awkward and quickly develops a serious dependence on alcohol; an insecure rugby jock who has inappropriate romantic feelings for someone at home, Beau throws himself into the brutality of sport (and his punitive coach) to keep his errant libido muted; Pema, adopted, wonders increasingly about her family roots in Tibet and where she truly belongs; chilly, angry, and the family’s organizer, Jill is an untenured linguistics professor with a life reduced to checklists who still resents her alcoholic (and recently deceased) father as well her mother’s denial of his awful parenting, and her troubled brother for abruptly leaving the country (and her with the responsibility of parental care); Jill’s dreamer of a husband, Les, also adopted, can’t seem to get his professional act together and in short order develops ominous symptoms; and, in the opening chapter, Jill’s mother has to be institutionalized after she’s diagnosed with dementia.

With so large a population of fraught dramatic situations in a book that doesn’t reach 250 pages of text, Crane burdens herself with a significant problem: how to treat each individual dilemma with the gravity, delicacy, insight, and respect it warrants while illustrating how the issue—whether alcoholism, gushing resentment, or rootlessness—affects other family members and the dynamic of the family itself.

She attempts to solve the problem in one way by elision. The book is broadly divided into two halves. “Chasing the Circle Closed,” the second segment, is set in 2011, three years after the six two-part chapters that comprise the first. This 100-page second act features all the characters returning to Fairfield for a “life celebration” dedicated to a fatally stricken family member. Characters briefly recall the passage of years during their homeward journeys, but the countdown to the reunion and the impending pre-funerary rite eclipses narrative dedication to their psychological development. Rendered as brief flashbacks, for instance, Pema’s return to Tibet, Beau’s rugby-playing stint in France, and Quinn’s days in rehab are effectively off-stage, strangely subordinated to the Big Serious Event despite Crane’s introducing them as key aspects of the characters’ development.

Likewise, after the opening chapter Crane begins each of the subsequent chapters in the novel’s first half with “eight months later,” “nine months later,” and so on. Time passes and the plot races toward the climactic, pathos-soaked deathbed scene, but at the expense of charting the psychological or scheduling minutiae of coping, say, with a loved one’s illness, or the practical changes that result when an adolescent character is arrested or acts out petulantly upon uncovering a new parental deception.

The idea of the lovely and sad tenderness of the novel’s final scene appears to have so transfixed Crane that the rest—the majority, in other words—feels hurried and sketchy, plot mechanics in need of further elucidation and refinement.

Coteau | 264 pages |  $18.95 | paper | ISBN # 978-1550505481