In this highly quotable, subtly arranged collage on families, Jane
Howard again combines a backporch informality with strong
journalistic authority and again, as in Please Touch (1970) and A
Different Woman (1973), comes up with dependable answers. "The
simple prospect of sitting down at a table set for ten, with hunks
of paper toweling for napkins, can lure me to travel long, soggy
distances." Her crisscross-country trek turns up gregarious Jewish
and Greek and Southern clans; single parents, extended families,
and precarious communal households. "All this, of course, is a
matter of style as well as of substance. Ashrams, like people,
attract or repel me by their syntax." She turns away from the
Conference jargon of "support systems," "genderdimorphic" favorite
toys, and "Shared Meals As A Core Experience" and offers instead
downhome anecdotes, examples of connectedness, cherished rituals,
old feuds, and jubilant appreciations which are easy to
reciprocate. References range from Aristotle to Richard Sennett,
the statistics are tucked in unobtrusively ("Each year we scratch
out a fifth of the entries in our address books"), and the pacing
and images are exceptional. Of a Fifth Avenue tribe: "They never
leave the oarlocks in the gunwales." There are the married
anthropologists, she with no parents, he with eleven; idiomatic
felicities savored ("He'll visit Maxine's leg off," "He's been
eating pork since he was qualified to eat"); and Harold Brodkey
quoted for emphasis: "Some people think that the amateurishness of
family life is the most widely-distributed human beauty." Plus, in
likable doses, Howard's peripatetic insights and observations, her
quest for personal illumination and private significance.
"Americans, as Will Rogers said, will join anything but their
families." But, since everyone has one and Howard has a handle on
it, expect a hearty welcome. (Kirkus Reviews)
In "Families" Jane Howard informally visits many dozens of families
and tries to discover what makes the best ones work so well.
Families are not dying, she finds, although they are evolving in
various ways. From the tightest-knit nuclear family or extended
clan to the most fragile new commune, the family in one guise or
another remains everybody's most basic hold on reality. We may run
away from our families as many do, but no sooner do we escape than
we find another one, often very much like it. Sympathetically, with
immense thrust, she crosses the continent to discover families'
myths, jokes, and rituals. She leafs through their scrapbooks, sits
on their porches, and takes part, when she can, in their feasts and
celebrations. She talks to a father of eighteen, several double
first cousins, stepchildren, multiple godmothers, an honorary
relative of an Indian tribe, and a nine-year-old boy who has no
family but his mother. She sits with a matriarch on the front stoop
of a ghetto house, goes camping with a family in Mexico, has
Thanksgiving with another in Iowa, and orders pizza with a Greek
clan in Massachusetts. Howard reports on visits to conventional
Southern and Jewish households and to innovative ones whose
members, lacking a common history, plan on building common futures
as if water were after all as thick as blood. She examines the
notion that "there are ways and ways of achieving kinship, of which
birth and marriage are only the most obvious." Millions of clans
and families all over the United States continue to celebrate,
quarrel, disband, reunite, and endure. Jane Howard makes us realize
how our lives are interwoven both with the families we are born
into and with those we invent as we go through life. "Families" is
compassionate, provocative, and profound. The paperback edition of
this important work will be essential reading for all those with an
interest in the study of familial bonds, particularly sociologists,
anthropologists, and psychologists.
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