Volume 54, Number 6 · April 12, 2007
Insight Without Anger
By Hilary Mantel
Family Romance: A Love Story
by John Lanchester
Marian Wood/Putnam, 370 pp., $27.95
There is a time, before we can read, when our lives are an open book. Before we are unleashed on our neighborhood we learn about privacy; we learn that some things—usually facts about money—are to be kept within the family. Then, long before we are emotionally mature, we learn about secrets—the kind a family keeps from other people, and the kind it keeps from itself. We do not have to know what these secrets are to feel the strain of not talking about them. They are often tied up with love or the lack of it, or are concerned with personal identity: they are about 'sisters' who are mothers, 'nephews' who are sons, they are about adoption and false paternity, and those people like absconding fathers who are written out of a family's narrative but who lurk below eye level, like a footnote which one day someone will want to consult.
Review, 3756 words
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