Jayne Anne Phillips

Start Free Trial

All in the Family

Download PDF PDF Page Citation Cite Share Link Share

SOURCE: “All in the Family,” in New Republic, No. 3649, December 24, 1984, pp. 36–9.

[In the following excerpt, Hulbert discusses the role of the family in several novels, including Phillips's Machine Dreams.]

In case all the babies don't make it clear, the babbling politicians do: the family is back in fashion. But Republicans, who prate about the family and freedom, and Democrats, who pontificate about the family and fairness, have it all wrong—as any baby or parent could tell them, given the words or the time. Fiction writers have both, and lately a striking number of them have been trying to write about what family life is really like. They don't evade the trammeled truth: that family relations are distinguished from most other ties precisely in being fundamentally unfree and all too often unfair. Yet this dark heart of domesticity doesn't depress these writers. Instead, they seem to be inspired by the household topography, the sticky surfaces and the fenced-off depths—more modest fictional terrain than the slippery expanse of society or the recesses of the self.

Of course, the bourgeois institution of the family has long occupied an important place in the bourgeois genre of the novel. But it has generally been a place of departure, or else a place of arrival, and rarely the central subject of patient, painstaking observation, as it is in these books. Here social aspirations and private, immoderate dreams play little or no part. These authors rarely move much beyond the confines of well-worn rooms and unwilled relations. Those aren't the highest themes, as George Eliot acknowledged in The Mill on the Floss, one of the great novels about the claims of kinship. Halfway into her story, she paused, fearing the tame start of her domestic drama might be trying her readers' patience. She was worried, she told them, that an

oppressive feeling may have weighed upon you in watching this old-fashioned family life on the banks of the Floss, which even sorrow hardly suffices to lift above the level of the tragic-comic. It is a sordid life, you say, this of the Tullivers and the Dodsons,—irradiated by no sublime principles, no romantic visions, no active, self-renouncing faith,—moved by none of those wild, uncontrollable passions which create the dark shadows of misery and crime. … Here one has conventional worldly notions and habits without instruction and without polish,—surely the most prosaic form of human life: proud respectability in a gig of unfashionable build, worldliness without side dishes.

A century later, Dwight Macdonald also remarked on the constricted canvas of family life in an essay about one classic American portrait, James Agee's A Death in the Family. The love that is the subject of the book, he noted,

is not sexual, not even romantic; it is domestic—between husband, wife, children, aunts, uncles, grandparents. This love is described tenderly, not in the tough, now-it-can-be-told style dominant in our fiction since Dreiser. The negative aspects are not passed over—Agee is, after all, a serious writer—but what he dwells on, what he “celebrates,” is the positive affection that Tolstoy presented in “Family Happiness” but that now is usually dealt with in the women's magazines. Very odd.

And it seems odder now, when even the women's magazines are apt to be impatient with old-fashioned family themes, that so many writers should unapologetically pick them up—so many that E. L. Doctorow, in a blurb for Jayne Anne Phillips's book [Machine Dreams], suggested that “truly rendered family life may now be the presiding virtue of the American novel.” This year's family portraitists rank as “serious” authors; Jayne Anne Phillips and Robb Forman Dew, both now on their second books, were highly praised for their first ones; and David Leavitt and Josephine Humphreys are following suit with unusually successful debuts. None of them ignores the negative aspects of family life, which have become more various and voguish than Eliot's Tullivers or Agee's Follets would have dreamed; they deal with affairs, fights, silences, drink, some drugs, separations, divorce, and death. Yet such struggles for personal liberation and enlightenment don't seem to be these authors' central interest. Instead, they are mainly preoccupied by the impossibility of any sort of final freedom from, or full understanding of, the bonds of blood.

It's not easy to dramatize the elusive yet inescapable power of family ties. For compared to our directed lives as individuals or citizens—where we're guided, and goaded, by rights and duties and choices—our experience as members of families is a muddled affair. The pull of blood and time prevails, and we swim along, from day to day and generation to generation, aspiring to endurance rather than transcendence. (Children, instead of immutable achievements, are the legacies that average families leave.) Sometimes the going is smooth, sometimes not, but always present is an awareness of the constant passage of time and the constraints on the will. That sense is humbling, as Leslie Farber, a psychoanalyst and social critic, explained in a rare essay on the distinctive feel of family life.

We want: to have lived honorably, to have mattered—to our time and to one another, to have had a meaning … we want, we want; meanwhile the potatoes are burning and the gas man is here to read the meter. What family life teaches us about time is that it goes—that what it brings or gives or permits, it also transforms or hardens or takes away. We learn that family life is a passionate daily traffic in perishables, and that what endures, in joy or grief, is seldom what we knew or chose.

In literature, those lessons don't always make for taut plots and commanding characters. These are humble books for the most part; there are no dramatic story lines and no driven heroes or heroines. Yet the authors do manage to build, and then sustain, the slow momentum suited to the shapeless stretches of time they chronicle; and their characters, though not outwardly engaged and energetic, are stubborn and unexpectedly resilient. Having abandoned romance, these writers at their best are ambitiously faithful to recalcitrant, prosaic reality.

Above all, they aim to address their imaginations to one invisible and invincible fact of existence, the passage of time—the fact to which their characters must accommodate their wills. Jayne Anne Phillips's Machine Dreams spans the longest stretch of years, more than four decades and three generations of a family. Opening with a mother's reminiscence to a daughter, the narrative then alternates among all four members of the family—Jean and Danner Hampson, the mother and daughter; Mitch and Billy, the husband and son. Some of their accounts are in the first person and sound like snippets of a slowly accumulating oral history of family life in small-town America, where jobs and marriages get ever less dependable. Others are presented in the third person and unroll like reels in a home movie that can capture the movements of minds and hearts as well as limbs.

All but two of the sections are labeled and limited by a date. Within the frozen frames, however, the emphasis is on the fluidity of days, years, generations. In this novel, as in the others, the sexes seem to navigate time's currents differently, and children don't escape its force for very long. The men are easily and radically disoriented by the “daily traffic in perishables”; the women seem to feel the rhythm of flux is less foreign, though still frightening. Both Jean and Danner are unnerved by the falling off from the past that their lives in Bellington bring. “Pointless, really, a lot of what happened,” Jean muses.

Didn't people have to do more than just endure? Didn't they have to be smart, as well, and know what things meant? Oh, she compared everyone to her mother: maybe that was what scared her. God, did she hate it—her mother's strength? It was what she loved most and what she hated.

Danner inherits the dilemma. But like her mother, who plans while Mitch founders and who finally divorces him when the kids go to college, Danner struggles to take her life in hand. And she tries to rally her brother Billy, whose inclination, not unlike his father's, is to be more fatalistic. After his concrete company fails, Mitch becomes obsessed by civil defense in the early 1960s, sure the end is near. For Billy, it's the prospect of the draft in the late 1960s that suspends his will; he drops out of college, explaining to his sister who urges him to see a draft counsellor, “You don't reason through these things. The best way to be lucky is to take what comes and not be a coward. … I'm going to go. It's in the cards.”

Billy, predictably, isn't lucky, and his family is devastated by proof that it is powerless against such intrusions of public history. Yet Danner's rage at what seems to be willful governmental negligence is the least successful part of Phillips's saga. Much more compelling is the sense of the family's inescapable, if far from all-powerful, presence in its members' lives. “If I hated my government, shouldn't I go and live in some other country?” Danner asks herself, sounding rhetorical and self-righteous. Her answer, however, clearly comes from the heart. “But my parents are my country, my divided country. … I'd never leave my country. I never will.” Phillips, moved by strong memories, has mapped that country down to its silent moments, making us hear, with Danner, “the house settle, a nearly inaudible creaking, ghostly clicking of the empty furnace pipes; her mother, her father, walking the halls in slippers.”

The political history that Phillips tries with mixed success to introduce into the foreground of her novel is barely even a background murmur in the other books. There's talk of nuclear danger in the Missouri town where Robb Forman Dew's The Time of Her Life is set, and softer mention of urban racial tensions in the Charleston of Josephine Humphreys's Dreams of Sleep. But the Parkses and the Reeses, the families portrayed in each, don't have the energy to worry about threats on that scale. The secure, stable lives they'd like to imagine for themselves are undermined by unnerving flux much closer to hand. The immediate source of disruption in both books (which have the uncanny resemblance sisters sometimes have) is a husband's affair.

The scope of these novels, compared to Machine Dreams, is small. Robb Forman Dew chronicles a fall and winter, whose slow passage is punctuated by two far from festive feasts at Thanksgiving and Christmas. Josephine Humphreys's narrative centers on the precipitate end of a well-established affair. The focus is on couples more than whole clans (the daughter in Dew's novel is “loved … as the third one among the three of them,” a peripheral status that is essential to the plot). But marriage bonds seem to be almost as much a matter of fate as blood ties are; both Dew and Humphreys downplay the role of choice in linking husband and wife. Claudia and Avery Parks, who have known each other since their days in the sandbox, feel the instinctive sympathy of close siblings. “She had always been with Avery, and he with her. They would be orphans in the world without the other.” The link between Will and Alice Reese, also acquaintances from youth, has surprisingly similar roots in the past. Her mother made his mother's wedding dress and Alice wonders,

Was that coincidence, that their mothers came together then? Or when Elizabeth's steel scissors cut into the thick creamy satin for Marcella's gown, were forces set that would gather strength and eventually join the children of those two women?

Time has had a hand in tying both couples together, but it is also what tests the strength of their connection. As in Machine Dreams, the men here lose their temporal bearings more abruptly. Will, a gynecologist in his 30s and Humphreys's most fully imagined character,

had wanted a family. Unmarried and childless he was loose in time, fatherless, mother-threatened. After he got his family, his sense of orientation and stability improved, but at times now, and increasingly often, a new, dizzying suspicion grabs him and spins him: the suspicion that the stability is false; that he will round his corner one day and there will be no house; and worse, that he will be glad to see it gone.

Spooked by all the melancholy women around him—by his patients, who are past eagerly bearing babies and “starting to spot and clot, they're scared”; by the “old sad ghost of the thing that used to be” between him and his wife—he finds some solace in an affair with his assistant. Fighting similar fears, Avery Parks leaves home to escape what he perceives as his wife's “nihilism.” He turns to his daughter's drab but determined violin teacher, who helps shore up his sense that there can be purpose in his life and progress in his work.

The wives of these two men have succumbed to what Avery and Will are trying to escape: the aimless flow of time. In stark contrast to the energetic women in Phillips's novel, Claudia Parks and Alice Reese are eerie portraits in passivity. Daily they submit to the unfolding of minutes, hours, mornings, nights, with only a general, pessimistic sense of what lies ahead. As well as making an ironic comment on a particularly unhappy phase in the Parks's life, Dew's title simply states the preoccupation of Claudia's existence: the ticking away of time. “I do work hard at the days. I work hard to make the days go by,” Claudia thinks to herself, and Dew goes on to explain her outlook this way:

She really did believe it, too. She was quite certain that in her life there was a connection between the passing of time and her need for it to pass. During any of the days when the pall of Avery's rage or drunkenness hung over the hours, she had the stray notion in the back of her mind that all the dreary hours would pass them by. She had the idea that they were going through something and would one day get to something else. If she had not thought she could force the pace of the days along, sorrow would have caught her up for sure.

Throughout Avery's absence, she lapses into even greater lassitude, drifting around the house and her daughter Jane like a disembodied phantom: “she had not even settled into a state of waiting since Avery left; she was only being there until the time went by.”

Alice Reese is almost as lethargic. She is barely able to keep up the routine motions of motherhood around her two small daughters, much less the more urgent gestures of a wife in trouble. The best she can do is hire a baby-sitter to introduce a purposeful presence into her house, a girl

who moves the way Alice would like to move, for example, if she had a mind to win her husband back. If she really wanted to make the effort; but she does not. It would be too much trouble, it would take too much energy. She has none.

But beneath the hopelessness, she, like Claudia, does have a steady faith in the continuity of things.

In the end, the wives' fatalistic patience pays off. Their husbands return, the burdens of family life proving, finally, more a welcome anchor than a dead-weight. There's a touch of facile sentimentality at the close of both novels—all the more striking after the fastidious realism. Yet Dew and Humphreys don't let their characters off that easily. Everyone is not going to live happily ever after, and it's children—the Parks's 11-year-old daughter Jane and 17-year-old Iris Moon, the Reese's baby-sitter—who seem to have the most suffering in store. They're both disconcertingly ageless, unconventional girls, with a detached perspective on the ways and weight of family life—more adult in most ways than Alice and Claudia. Unlike the grown-ups who finally embrace the unromantic “family happiness” of Tolstoy's story and feel liberated by it, the girls have a sense of imprisonment. Alice mulls optimistically that “in the long run all this lassitude may prove to be peace in a kind of disguise, and all this despair turn out to be the purest shape that hope can take.” But Iris's future doesn't look so rosy; the Reeses may be on the mend, but she breaks down amid her own already shattered family—her mother had her at 15, and her father deserted them—and her dreams of an escape evaporate. And as Claudia and Avery Parks are rediscovering their indissoluble bond in the darkness of Christmas night, Jane is “heartbroken with the hopelessness of loving Avery and Claudia so much for all her life, the energy it would require, the fatigue it would cause.” …

Get Ahead with eNotes

Start your 48-hour free trial to access everything you need to rise to the top of the class. Enjoy expert answers and study guides ad-free and take your learning to the next level.

Get 48 Hours Free Access
Next

The Short Story of Jayne Anne Phillips

Loading...