Volume 55, Number 1 · January 17, 2008
Family Secrets
By Tim Parks
ABC: A Novel
by David Plante
Pantheon, 247 pp., $23.00
OTHER BOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS ARTICLE
The Francoeur Family: The Family, The Woods, The Country
by David Plante
London: Hogarth, 547 pp. (1984)
Difficult Women: A Memoir of Three
by David Plante
Atheneum, 173 pp. (1983)
Annunciation
by David Plante
Ticknor and Fields, 346 pp. (1994)
Born the sixth of seven brothers in a French-Canadian enclave of Providence, Rhode Island, in 1940, the writer David Plante is best known for his trilogy The Francoeur Family (1978–1982), a novelized memoir of childhood, adolescence, and early maturity. Told without fear of the humdrum and repetitious, the book's achievement is its gradual and convincing creation of nine characters—father, mother, and seven sons—each highly individual but seen to be so in reaction and relation to one another.
Review, 4129 words
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