A Southern Family: Gail Godwin

Where has this book been hiding? I had the great fortune of finding it in a used bookstore and could not put it down. The prose is beautiful, characters seem real (all of them!), and the theme makes one think. Not your typical brain fluff kind of book - read this one to get in touch with feelings, exercise your mental skills, and enjoy reading. Highly recommend! I will be on the lookout for more by this author.

When black sheep Theo Shaw is found shot to death, along with his girlfriend, the only survivor,his young son, his already quirky family is thrown into turmoil. Told from multiple perspectives, including the deceased's former girlfriend, his writer sister, his mother and his golden-boy guilt-stricken brother, A Southern Family is an intriguing meditation on family ties, present and those that exist from beyond the grave.

Not for those looking for a suspenseful thriller, Gail Godwin is one of our best modern day writers, who is interested in character driven novels as opposed to those focusing on plot. Here, Clare, Ralph, Lily, Theo, Snow and others are feeling and thinking human beings who have positive and negative traits -- in other words, they are real people, living through a tragic and uncertain event. Even though the book is rather long, I did not want to leave these people, even in their grief. If you enjoyed this book, I would also recommend Stuart O'Nan's "Wish You Were Here," as well as three Susan Howatch books: "Wheel of Fortune," The Rich are Different," and "Sins of the Fathers," which are all excellent examples of rotating the first person in each chapter (as is done here).

I've read all of Gail Godwin's books, and this is my favorite. She's working with material that seems to mean a great deal to her here --and it shows. The book is basically several character's reactions to a very tragic death. Each character is drawn exquisitely, coming alive through his or her own point-of-view chapters. In fact, this is the only one of Godwin's books to present the point of view of so many complex characters. I saw her in a bookstore seveal years ago and asked her what the origin of the book was, and she said she was working from a similar incident in real life--the death of her half-brother. So in this book she seems to be trying to come to terms with family conflicts by bringing each family member to life on the page. She does a wonderful job, going beyond any kind of therapy for herself into true art, taking her own pain and making it universal. I reread this book every once in a while, and found it especially useful recently because I was going through my own reactions to a death in my family. Yes, to respond to one of the other reviews, there is hatred here, and conflicts are not resolved. It's very, very true to life that way, complex and rich.