Volume 56, Number 7 · April 30, 2009
A Family Worth Knowing
By Michael Dirda
Lark and Termite
by Jayne Anne Phillips
Knopf, 254 pp., $24.00
Any good reader certainly tries, in Henry James's phrase, to be one on whom nothing is lost. We constantly adjust our expectations, not seeking to find in Proust the terseness of Hemingway, or in Joyce the headlong action of Alexandre Dumas. But it's impossible to wholly put aside our genders, our past experiences, and, not least, our often peculiar tastes. For instance, I like the weird-tales fiction of H.P. Lovecraft, I really do, but recognize that many intelligent people find him unreadable—sententiously overwrought and cheesy, a purveyor of altogether too much eldritch ichor. At the same time I generally shun the modern family memoir, particularly those highlighting the author's dysfunctional childhood and often including sexual abuse, drunkenness and addiction, parental abandonment, divorce, religious mania, war trauma, small-town insularity, handicapped siblings, poverty, and quiet desperation.
Review, 3363 words
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