Family Saga

I just finished listening to this book, We Were The Mulvaneys, on my iPod. Although I get a lot of books from Gabriel and Shirin I downloaded this one from my library. I don't often read long family sagas but I like variety and was in the mood for one. We Were The Mulvaneys is not a new book (1996) and was an Oprah book in 2001. It was made into a movie in 2002. It wasn't my favorite book ever but I liked it a lot.

The plot in one sentence, not easy to do as this book is 464 pages long, is that a nice family - parents, three sons, one daughter - living an idyllic life in the beautiful farm country of upstate New York in the mid-1970's, suffer the consequences of an assault on the daughter. Oates does an amazing job of character development both before and after the incident. I felt that I knew these people very well, cared about them, and agonized as they fell apart. It was simply the story of the disintegration of a family, and we watch the total self-destruction of the father who felt that he should have been able to protect his lovely daughter.

Wow, that sounds depressing. At times it was, especially when the father begins a downward spiral of behavior that totally destroys the family (you just want to scream at him) and the mother who doesn't call him on it or try to rein him in (she expects the children to understand his pain and accept his behavior as she does), but ultimately the individuals (not the father, who dies) recover. The family is never the same of course, that would be fantasy, but 12 years after "it" - as the family refers to the incident - they regather and form new family bonds that are satisfying and realistic.

It made me think about how one event in a person's life can change it forever, and how it can radiate out to others and change their lives as well. I kept wanting to shout at them, "GET SOME HELP!" but some people are just too proud to seek help and these were strong pioneer-stock people unlikely to admit weakness. And this was the '70's, before the era of self-help books and commonly getting therapy. I was the same age as the teenaged characters and remember that reaching out just wasn't done like it is today. So instead it took them 12 agonizing years for the resolution to naturally evolve... Darwinian time. Remember, Darwin said, "It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change."