The Family Tree

Carole Cadwalladr's first novel is a must-read for anyone who grew up in the seventies - her musings on American and English popular culture are worth reading the book for alone. That's just the icing on the cake, however. This book is a fascinating study of a middle-class family - trying to stay normal with a decidedly not normal mom who we later learn is mentally ill. She is written so sympathetically that even when she does inexcusable things you can't help but feel her desperation and pain. All in all, a wonderful first novel, and an excellent read.

I loved this book for so many different reasons. The characters jump off the page and stay with you long after you have finished reading the book. The plot circles around this family with compelling stories, surprising twists, and a subtle sense of humor. As a non-scientist, I even enjoyed the way Cadwalladr added explanations of theories of genetics!

Ever since reading Behind the Scenes at the Museum, I have been hoping to find a writer to match Kate Atkinson. Some have come very close (Barbara Trapido, Hillary Mankell, Tom Perrotta). Now comes Carole Cadwalladr. She performs that most delicate of juggling acts -- keeping at least three stories spinning along, with each generation, each decade being presented in all its silliness. As one reviewer pointed out, it helps to have lived in all the times depicted, which is one of the reasons why I can relate to the story so strongly. I look forward to Cadwalladr's next book as eagerly as I anticipate future offerings from Atkinson, Trapido, and Mankell.

Cadwalladr shoots her satirical barbs in so many directions that it's hard to keep up. One of her targets is her own book. "it sounds like one of those novels. You know. Three generations of women blah, blah, blah. Triumph over adversity. After many trials it all turns out ok in the end." That does basically summarise the plot. The heroine Rebecca Monroe is a cultural historian married to a nasty evolutionary psychologist and worried about the genetics of bipolar disorder in her family. (It's interesting to me that manic-depressive illness, which has become such a modish literary plot device, dates back to Emil Kraepelin, and that the genetic studies that so much concern Rebecca Monroe are based on old-fashioned study of family trees rather than any fancy molecular biology, and owe more to Gregor Mendel than Crick and Watson) There are jabs, sometimes savage and bitter, at every fashion in British life in the forties, the sixties, the seventies, the eighties and the twenty-first centuary. I think you'd have to know a lot about the things and times she skewers to properly appreciate it. Some of the merriment is derived from poking fun at what those benighted Britons in those distant decades thought was new and fashionable, which is not quite fair. It will be our turn next.

The Family Tree is that rare book: a novel that moves you, makes you laugh, forces you to read on (I stayed up until 3am as I just couldn't put it down), and stays with you long after you've finished the final page. It's so unusual to come across a book that is not only so humorous (the depiction of the wilder shores of 1970s suburbia is hilarious), but also so intelligent. The Family Tree raises all sorts of questions about family, class, sex, relationships, race, genes, popular culture...yet it never feels forced or artificial. By plotting three generations of the same family, these questions occur naturally: how much of who we are is determined by our genes? By our upbringing? By the TV we watched? By our memories? At the heart of the book is the question of nature versus nurture. Rebecca Monroe, the central character, has two strikes against her: naturewise, she's possibly inherited her mother's unstable genes; nurturewise, she is haunted by the guilty knowledge that she was in some way responsible for the breakdown of her family. As a graduate student studying popular culture, she relates incidents from her 70s childhood (the child's eye view of her parent's marriage is only ever half right), weighing up too, the impact of Dallas, Love Story and Charlie's Angels. She tries to understand not only her personal history but also how the age in which she grew up has influenced and affected her (furtively reading her feminist aunt's copy of The Joy of Sex and trying to imitate Lady Diana's hairstyle, for example). Her husband, on the other hand, a geneticist, believes that personality is simply a by-product of our DNA. It's a great and satisfying read that defies categorisation. Cadwallader's understanding of the workings of family is reminiscent of Anne Tyler or Carol Shields. While the high comedy of the 1970's scenes has shades of David Sedaris. But, it's the ending that lifts the Family Tree into a class of its own - a moving, poignant, finale that left me gasping for more.