OT book review 'The Family Tree': Genealogy Is Destiny (fwd

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Dolly Ziegler

OT book review 'The Family Tree': Genealogy Is Destiny (fwd

Legg inn av Dolly Ziegler » 23 jan 2005 16:41:02

Hello to the list. Book review, New York Times, may interest some
here. Cheers, Dolly in Maryland
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'The Family Tree': Genealogy Is Destiny

January 23, 2005
By PATRICIA T. O'CONNER

THE wacky English family is a venerable literary
institution, and this first novel from a gifted British
writer has all the makings of a farcical romp. But
eccentricity is one thing and dysfunction another. The
laughs in ''The Family Tree'' -- and there are many -- have
a way of becoming uncomfortable. It's soon obvious that
what Carole Cadwalladr has begun as a comic novel isn't
going to end that way.

The storyteller is Rebecca Monroe, a 30-ish, part-time
academic looking back on three generations of her family's
history. Chronologically, the novel has three settings --
the 1940's, the 1970's and the present -- with episodes
from the different periods shuffled like cards in a deck.
Rebecca relies on written records and ''my own inquiries
and investigations'' for what she hasn't witnessed: ''I
admit that I may embellish, just a touch, but essentially
these are the true facts, as I know them.''

Rebecca is married to a superstar scientist, Alistair
Betterton, a behavioral geneticist whose good looks and
glib tongue have made him a popular talk-show guest. She's
recently left her consulting job to work on a Ph.D. thesis
about popular culture in the 1970's. ''We're one of those
couples you meet and think, Well I'd never have put them
together.'' Can't argue with that. If there's a gene for
obnoxiousness, Alistair has it.

For him, DNA is everything; culture is irrelevant. But ''to
understand my story, you need the cultural references,''
Rebecca explains, helpfully sprinkling the narrative with
footnotes about 1970's television, both British and
American: ''Dallas,'' ''Sale of the Century,'' ''Charlie's
Angels,'' ''The Waltons'' -- all of it ''nostalgic
rubbish,'' according to her husband. ''When people ask
Alistair what I do, he says I watch 'Coronation Street.' ''
He, on the other hand, does genuine research -- ''proper
academic work.'' For Alistair, luck is immaterial; chance,
''just a word expressing ignorance.''

There are almost enough missing pieces in the Monroe
genealogy to make up a separate family tree. And many of
them, it seems, can be traced to grandmother Alicia, a
working-class girl from Yorkshire. There's her marriage to
a decidedly weird first cousin. There's her affair with a
Jamaican airman with skin ''the color of a Callard & Bowser
toffee.'' And there's her class-conscious daughter, Doreen,
who has a tendency to come seriously unglued.

Cadwalladr has an uncanny talent for mixing hilarity and
pain, for making the reader laugh and wince at the same
time. Eight-year-old Rebecca, for example, asks awkward
questions at the most inopportune moments: ''What's
incest?'' ''What's an 'affair'?'' Why does her sister,
Tiffany, have brown eyes ''if all our grandparents have
blue eyes?'' And Doreen, comic though she seems, isn't just
another eccentric, screwball mom, Lucille Ball with a
cleanliness fetish. In perhaps the funniest but most
wrenching scene in the book, family and guests gather to
munch sausage rolls and watch the wedding of Charles and
Diana on the BBC. (''She's fluffed the vows!'') A shocking
secret is served up along with the buffet, and the party
comes to a violent end. Mum locks herself in the bathroom
and never comes out. ''My 70's,'' Rebecca explains, ''ended
on July 29, 1981. The day my mother died.''

The multigenerational snippets are woven together as
intricately as strands of DNA. Which brings us back to
Alistair and his gene studies. Science, he says, needs
volunteers -- so naturally he volunteers his wife. ''It's
for a good cause,'' he tells her. Once a month, Rebecca
trundles off to Alistair's lab for blood tests,
examinations and interviews by a team of researchers. ''Why
me?'' she asks. He doesn't say, but it's not hard to guess.
We know he's interested in mitochondrial DNA, which is
transmitted along maternal lines. Eventually, Rebecca puts
the pieces together: ''My grandmother, my mother and me;
fruit flies all.''

''The Family Tree'' is engrossing, its humorous passages
deftly tinged with melancholy, as when Rebecca recalls the
time Alistair told her about the hedge sparrow: ''The
dunnock. . . . It mates for life. 'And then they discovered
DNA testing,' said Alistair. 'And found that 10 to 15
percent of all dunnock offspring are not biologically
related to the father. The tabloids had a field day with
it.' '' Rebecca tries and fails to imagine hanky-panky
among the dunnocks: ''I'd always assumed the animal kingdom
was above that kind of thing.''

For the most part, Cadwalladr's plot juggling doesn't get
in the way. But by the end of ''The Family Tree,'' the
relentless rewinding and fast-forwarding becomes a
distraction. In the final section, a blizzard of short,
choppy scenes set in the present, the book loses its focus.
And the recurring tree imagery is an unnecessary elbow in
the ribs: ''I've been thinking about the trees again. You
remember. The trees in the back garden. . . . It's like a
family tree, of course. I don't know why I didn't think of
that before.''

No matter. This is an ambitious debut by a novelist with a
wicked sense of humor. I look forward to Cadwalladr's next
book. With any luck, it'll be a comic one.

(Patricia T. O'Conner is the author of three books about
language and writing, ''Woe Is I,'' ''Words Fail Me'' and
''You Send Me'' (written with Stewart Kellerman).)

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/23/books ... R.html?ex=
1107402550&ei=1&en=d0cf9758f2ad2460

[try tinyurl instead: http://tinyurl.com/5uf6y ]

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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