Family Album

Have you always wanted a large family, fantasizing about the giddy happiness of your progeny as they play in the manicured yard? Would you love a top-rated kitchen? Do you desire to pull off gourmet meals (that said multiple children will eat sans complaining)? Okay, but what if that came with a few secrets you had to keep, a blind eye you had to turn, an aloof husband, an inscrutable au pair who's long outlasted her original purpose for hire? What if those 6 beloved children scattered as far as the earth could take them? Oh, except for your favorite child, the ne'er do well, addicted child who was never at fault for all the paths on which he was led astray.

In Family Album, Penelope Lively builds this world up and lets time tear it down. Alison doggedly insists she has created a perfect childhood for each of her grown children. She loves her home and hearth and doesn't quite understand why they don't all come home more often. We get the kids' perspectives in here as well. Most of their memories are decent--there's the usual sibling rivalry and their father's lack of attention, there's some scary-seeming cellar game that turns out fairly tame, but the children seem to have come out more or less unscathed. . They don't, however, share their mother's enthusiasm for Allersmead, the family home--or for children and cooking, for that matter--and they look a bit oddly on Alison and Charles continuing to rattle around in the old Edwardian house, not quite moving out of the 1970s and still housing their au pair, Ingrid. Why she's still around isn't really that much of a mystery, though Lively takes her time explaining her presence. This is more a book about what we take and what we leave of our happy/unhappy childhoods.

My favorite character is Charles, the patriarch, though he's more like a distant uncle who shuffles in and out of the lives of his wife, au pair, and children. He's a scholarly writer, who bypasses the usual path to scholarship (teaching is somehow beneath him). Ironically, his greatest publishing triumph is a book on adolescence and youth, though he has very little idea of his own children's lives as they grow up, not even fully aware of their ages at times. Sarcasm is learned early and applied often among the inmates of Allersmead. He's a great character because he's not evil, and not a bad father in his own way (I guess). There doesn't seem to be much room for parenting with Alison on site anyway. Any left over mothering or parenting is taken up by Ingrid. Not that Charles minds. He's too busy in his own head to pay attention to what goes on around him. He's an interesting character.

All the grown children are drawn differently enough to keep them straight and I've always loved a book that shows trajectory from youth to adulthood, I love seeing the neatness of: this is who I was and now here I am. There's nothing too neat about their lives, though, and the veil is slipping even from Alison in her dream state. She's got talent to spare in the kitchen and so she herself is never made ridiculous. I appreciate how rounded Lively developed each character. It's a good read.

Years ago, I'd read Heatwave by Penelope Lively and I loved it, loved the twist at the end, but after that I'd never found anything else by her that I could finish. Family Album has started me back into her books.

**The picture I've posted of the cover is not the cover I read from. It must be the British version, but I liked it so much better than the American version. The friendly chaos better captures life in Allersmead, both as it was (sometimes) and how Alison wanted it.