Family Album: A Novel

June 30, 2010 | By In Entertainment |

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5 Comments so far

  1. Pamela Malone on June 30th, 2010

    While I’m a Penelope Lively fan, I found this novel hard to take. It was so viscerally realistic, I felt I was living it. In that sense it was weirdly not literary.
    Rating: 3 / 5

  2. David M. Giltinan on June 30th, 2010

    Skillfully written, engaging characters, but ultimately this was not as enjoyable or as gripping as I had been expecting. The constant shifting around of narrative voice and timeframe didn’t bother me particularly, as it was always pretty straightforward to figure out where we were and who was doing the talking. There’s very little plot to speak of – the “dark family secret” just didn’t seem that big of a deal. So it really boils down to character, and Lively is very skilled at drawing believable characters.

    That said, she never managed to make me care about them all that much, maybe because I sense that she doesn’t either. They seem more like chess pieces for her to juggle in what is admittedly an accomplished piece of writing. But this is not a book (or family) I will remember a year from now.
    Rating: 3 / 5

  3. jinx on June 30th, 2010

    I must confess I only read the last chapter and I adored it. It was like Bridgit Jones trying to sell the family homestead. I was tempted to xerox the last chapter and email it to my brothers. It actually works well as just a short story. At the very end I was laughing on the commuter train. Very funny.
    Rating: 4 / 5

  4. mcryan on June 30th, 2010

    Six kids growing up in the same household, all experiencing different childhoods, holding different perceptions of family life, and ultimately leading very different lives. Mother who donates her entire life to homemaking and chid rearing, a reluctant, emotionally absent Father, and a seemingly out of place au pair girl. Lively does a great job of capturing the nuances of family life that so often never get put into words however the story was dull and lacked spice. The barrage of emails at the end seemed to go on for far too long. I didn’t love this book.
    Rating: 2 / 5

  5. W. S. Pennington on June 30th, 2010

    As I told my wife, I think Penelope Lively was “coasting” when she wrote this book. In other words, I don’t think she gave it her “all”, which I resent because when I decided to read this book I factored in her reputation and in this case it wasn’t deserved. Another way I look at it is that “I wanted to like this book”. The subject matter was interesting (I’m the oldest of six). The setting intrigued me (I grew up in a similar type house). The title, Family Album, drew me in. As it turned out, I was disappointed in the spottiness of the overall book. At times I was engaged. At other times I wasn’t and had to force myself to keep going.

    Mainly the thing that kept me going were the characters. But even these for the most part weren’t as developed as they could have been. Especially the father who I didn’t think was a credible character at all. We get the general idea. He’s a heady, eccentric, self-involved man who never talks and has removed himself completely from his family and the world. Yet, at the same time, he manages to keep his highly energetic wife and his Scandinavian nanny (with whom he has the world’s all-time shortest fling) happy enough to put up with him, helps raise six children, heads up the household and gets several books published. All this without hardly ever saying a word! I just think the author was being lazy and didn’t bother to go to the trouble of rounding him out. He was somewhat interesting as far as he went. But that was the problem with the whole book. At times I got the feeling, “that was interesting to me. That really made me think”. But, like the father, none of the “pieces and parts” went as far as they could.

    Finally, there was really no plot to speak of except for the ongoing (through the whole book) dancing around the “family secret” involving the child who just happens to look like the nanny. Personally, I think the author makes far too big a deal out of this. I don’t think this kind of thing is as uncommon as she seems to think and, in my view, wouldn’t be nearly as traumatic as she makes it for all concerned throughout all of their lives. Which leads me to my final criticism. Just as a known author publishing a book that is not as complete as she could make it is misleading to her audience, so to is the title, “Family Album”. The title suggests a warmth and well-roundedness that does not exist in this book.
    Rating: 2 / 5

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