Three novels that explore the generational realities in families past and present.
The Hand That First Held Mine – Maggie O’Farrell
Love leaves traces behind, and those traces can haunt our present day loves. This book tells of two such loves. In post-war rural England, Lexie Sinclair is eager to begin her life in bohemian London and flees there for love and independence. O’Farrell draws a vivid character in Lexie, with her impetuous disavowal of the conventions of her time and in her vibrant embrace of life. She dives into an affair and into a journalism career with scintillating vigor. Meanwhile, in present-day London, Ted and Elina’s lives have been upended by the traumatic arrival of their newborn son. Elina is engulfed by her newborn’s needs and the initially myopic role of motherhood. For Ted, something about his son’s arrival has rent his emotional fabric, and he is nagged by a renewed sense of loss and longing that causes him to retreat from his wife and son. Slowly, as the pieces of his past fall into place, Ted finds himself confronting a monumental question: Do we know who we are when the truth is withheld from us? These two parallel stories introduce memorable characters whose stories meet for a powerful conclusion about what is passed down unwittingly from parent to child. O’Farrell establishes an elegant literary voice in this emotionally stirring novel in which the past haunts the present.
Middlesex – Jeffrey Eugenides
How could the choices or even the genetic code of our ancestors affect our lives? This Pulitzer Prize-winning novel spans three generations of a Greek-American family while chronicling Detroit’s history through the story of Calliope Stephanides. A hermaphrodite raised as a girl in the 1960s, Cal narrates the story of the Stephanides family, a tale that begins with Cal’s grandparents Desdemona and Lefty — cousins, then lovers — whose tumultuous departure from Asia Minor to America sets the stage for a family story with a unique yet universal cast of characters. Told in an intimate, wry authorial voice that carries the reader along a most memorable and unconventional journey, Cal’s story makes the “rollercoaster ride of a single gene through time” truly enthralling. From the beginning, Cal recounts being born once as a girl in 1960 and again as a boy in 1974, prompting the question in readers’ minds: “Did Calliope have to die in order to make room for Cal?” In this richly layered story about family, community, gender and identity, Cal uncovers the myths passed down in families and the stories that become central to our understanding of ourselves.
The Arrivals – Meg Mitchell Moore
You can never go home again — that is, until you do. Ginny and William Owens’ three adult children return to their Vermont home over the span of one summer. It starts when their eldest daughter Lillian arrives with her newborn son and 3-year-old daughter, without revealing that she has left her husband. Next, their son Stephen and his pregnant wife Jane are waylaid on a weekend visit when Jane’s pregnancy becomes high risk. Finally their youngest daughter, Rachel, overwhelmed by the expense of life in New York City and a recent breakup, completes the cast. The Owens spend most of the summer tending to their children’s needs before they realize they have been neglecting their own. Ginny, who views her children as her life’s work, takes their problems personally and wonders what she could have done differently in the past to ensure their happiness. How, as parents, do you learn to help your children take responsibility for their own lives while maintaining love and support? Moore’s debut offers a refreshingly loving family where dysfunction is of the mild variety, and family roles and assumptions play out in comic yet poignant ways.
