Why Did I Ever by Mary Robison

"I need plywood," said my son, Paulie, in his sleep. Or I heard wrong. I know it was "need" something.

That was my first day there, at his flat on St. Anne, before the NYPD began hiding him.

He looked like this: in white cotton socks and frayed blue jeans, a cowhide belt and a petal-green sweater. his hands in their horrible bandages must've been on his lap and I couldn't see them because he was bent over, with his plate pushed aside and his face on the dining room table, and he was all-the-way asleep, with a tiny chip of emerald glinting there in the lobe of his ear.

Money Breton lives in Alabama with her friend Hollis ("Hollis not my ex-anything and not my boyfriend. He's my friend. Maybe not the best friend I have in the world. He is, however, the only."). Her daughter Mev has a kindly heart and a need for methadone. She has a boyfriend in New Orleans named Dix who is as dumb as a concrete levee. She works as a "script doctor," polishing up a script about Bigfoot and flying out to Los Angeles every few weeks to get yelled at by the producer, Belinda. Her son Paulie is in the witness protection program, readying to testify against some unnamed assailant (she calls him the "Evil Snake Parts Criminal," among other things) who is responsible for raping and torturing Paulie. And her cat has gone missing.

Why Did I Ever is made up of 500+ mini-chapters, some stretching to a couple of pages, but many more only a sentence or two long. They're clever little snapshots of frustration, of interpersonal tension, of annoyance and grief, of professional hardship and, when Money lets herself think about him, a deep, deep anguish about the state of her son. Most of them aren't all that important to the plot, the plot that isn't all that important to the novel. They are funny and weird:

I would say to one particular ex: "Twit was too short a word and Pigboy was unkind. I should never have said such ugly things about you. Bumpkin, however, and Thieving, Lying Wino can stay right where they are."

I liked the ones about Dix especially:

Dix says, "You don't gotta worry. I'm not one of those guys gets his rocks off beatin' on a woman."

"God love you," I say.

"You do gotta worry, though, that at times I can be verbally abusive."

"No, you really can't," I say. "To do that you'd have to know the language better, Dix. You'd ahve to know, first of all, what is a verb."

"Everything that you own," he says, "is the BEST STUFF MONEY CAN BUY!"

One can easily recognize Why Did I Ever as the work of the same woman who wrote Oh!, a book I also found to be riotously funny. Except Oh! has a kind of forward energy, a propulsiveness that makes it impossible to put aside, but Why Did I Ever takes a deliberately antithetical strategy, delivering the novel in halting chunks that only seem to come together in the aggregate. But this works, because it's easy to see that Money's life itself is similarly in tatters. The story with Paulie, which is only rarely directly addressed but seems to run under every other misfortune and sadness, as if Money cannot let herself look at or think about her son directly, is extremely touching and sad. I was skeptical for most of the novel that Robison would pull it off, but I thought the ending especially really brought things to an effective (if very sad) conclusion.

Half a Life by V. S. Naipaul

Willie Chandran and his sister Sarojini went to the mission school. One day one of the Canadian teachers asked Willie, in a smiling friendly way, "What does your father do?" It was a question he had put at various times to other boys as well, and they had all readily spoken of the degraded callings of their fathers. Willie wondered at their shamelessness. But now when the question  was put to him, Willie found he didn't know what to say about his father's business. He also found he was ashamed. The teacher kept on smiling, waiting for an answer, and at last Willie Chandran said with an irritation, "You all know what my father does." The class laughed. They laughed at his irritation and not at what he had said. From that day Willie Chandran began to despise his father.

Willie Chandran's middle name is Somerset, for the great English writer W. Somerset Maugham. Maugham, it seems, granted no small fame to Willie's father by describing him in a book as a famous ascetic who had taken in a vow of silence. In truth--as we learn from a story told to Willie by his father early in Half a Life--Willie's father took up the ascetic life more or life by accident. As a young man, he had been a follower of the Mahatma, and took up with a girl from an untouchable class in an act of social self-sacrifice. Far from shattering the caste system, the relationship scandalized both sides, and Willie's father was forced to flee to a religious life in order to escape their persecution. Willie is the offspring of this union, which has made his life unstable and uncertain, and for putting him in such a strange and impossible position he has learned to hate his father. Willie's father, fearing that rage and resentment will eat Willie up if he stays in India, writes to Maugham, who pulls a few strings to get him into an English university.

I was really struck by the elegance of Half a Life. Its three-part structure is sort of a marvel: first the first-person story told to Willie by his father, then the third-person section describing Willie's alienating experiences at university in London, and then a final first-person story told by Willie to his sister Sarojini about his fifteen years living in an unnamed African country with a wife he'd met at school. What becomes clear is that Willie has given three different places in the world a fair chance, and yet none of them has provided them with a sense of stability or belonging. This is the state of the colonized subject, and it's Naipaul's big subject, maybe never developed more fully than here in Half a Life. Willie can't thrive in India, caught between old ways and new ones, and he can't thrive in England, where his diminished status as a colonial make him a kind of outcast. In England he develops a budding writing ability that began as a child, and even publishes a book of stories about India, but they are little read and little appreciated, and he gives the passion up. Are we reading, perhaps, a story about the Naipaul that might have been?

In Africa, Willie returns to the colonized world, but not his own colonized world. There's a kind of logic to this--perhaps in Africa, Willie will be freed from the strictures of his own Indian background but also the repressive ideology of the British elite. But he finds himself embroiled again in the eternal tensions between the colonial power and the colonized, suffering through the smallness and pettiness of parochial Africans who can only assert their own value through their similarity to the Portuguese. Violence bubbles at the edge of the African city where he lives, and it's unclear whether, as a non-Portuguese outsider, Willie will be a target or be spared. When, one day, he slips and falls on the marble steps of his home, he wakes up in the hospital and announces to his wife he's leaving her. I can't, he tells her, live your life anymore; I must go and find my own. This leads him to Sarojini, a socialist rabblerouser who has needled Willie for his complacency by letter for years, and it's to her--the symbol of a new, untested, perhaps even more destabilizing approach--that he tells the story of his African life.

Willie Chandran's life is a failure three times over. In the end, he seems little different than the Africans who bounce between Africa and Portugal because neither can provide them a sense of fullness, though because of custom and language they can live nowhere else. It's a bitter book, maybe the most bitter of all Naipaul's books (although Guerillas come to mind) and rarely leavened with the kind of humor that enlivens A House for Mr. Biswas. Unlike Biswas, though, Willie Chandran is all too aware of his own shortcomings, and the impossibility of the kind of life that would provide dignity and belonging. I came away thinking this is one of Naipaul's most effective and effecting books.

Men of Maize by Miguel Angel Asturias

Maize should be planted as they used to plant it, as they still do, to give the family its grub, and not for business. Maize is sustenance, it allows you to get by, more than get by. You show me a rich maizegrower, Hilario. It seems crazy, but we're all worse off. There've been times in my house when we ain't even had money for candles. It's the folk who own chocolate trees, cattle, orchards, beehives, who are rich. Small-town rich folk, maybe, but rich for all that, ain't so very bad being the biggest fish in a small pool. Now the Indians used to have all those things, as well as the maize that forms our daily bread. They did things in a small way, if you like, but they had all they needed, they weren't greedy like us because now, Hilario, greed has become a way of life to us. You just take maize itself: poverty sown and harvested until the very earth is worn out...

Miguel Angel Asturias' "Modernist Epic of the Guatemalan Indians" begins with a poor Indian named Gaspar Ilom waking from a disturbing dream: a voice deprecating him for not doing more to defend his land and his people from the rapacious mestizos who would exploit both for commercial farming. "Gaspar Ilom," the voice says, "lets them steal the sleep from the eyes of the land of Ilom... Gaspar Ilom lets them hack away the eyelids of the land of Ilom with axes... Gaspar Ilom lets them scorch the leafy eyelashes of the land of Ilom with fires that turn the moon to furious red..." Gaspar leads a group of Indians in rebellion against the planters, but is defeated by their military might. First they try to poison him, but he washes the poison away in the river. When he emerges to find that his people have been decimated, he returns to the river to drown, but all is not lost: this story passes immediately into a myth that inspires the poor Indians of Guatemala.

The world of Men of Maize is one in which myths and men live contemporaneously, rather than in a distant or imagined past. Take, for example, the story of Goyo Yic, the blind man whose wife--rescued by him from the slaughter of Gaspar's band perhaps a decade or two earlier--has left him. He wanders desperately looking for her, seeking her voice, enduring desperately a painful cure for his blindness, and seeking her on a ridge that will become named for her, Maria Tecuna Ridge. When, later, the wife of Señor Nicho abandons him as well, he has already absorbed his contemporary's story as a myth. All women who leave their husbands have become, without the intervening years of mythmaking or history, tecuns. Señor Nicho's despair leads him to abandon his post as the postman (lol), much to the dismay of the people of the towns who rely on him for the facilitation of business and the exchange of money. He discovers that he is one of those who has a second animal self, a coyote, and in this guise he meets the "fairy wizards" who once watched over the defeat of Gaspar Ilom. In exchange for a glimpse of the mythical world behind the world, they force him to burn his sack of mail.

The "Men of Maize" are both the Indians and their mestizo oppressors, despite the difference in the way they plant: the Indians are sustenance farmers who live in relationship with the earth, while the mestizos clear cut the Guatemalan forests with its teeming wildlife in order to plant large commercial farms. This difference is at the heart of Asturias' epic, which pits the forces of capitalism and economic production against simple folkways. An old story, perhaps, but I was really struck by how richly Asturias evokes the lush Guatemalan jungle using the language of Latin American modernism. The novel is often complicated and difficult, though it is also at times funny and homespun, as with the depictions of the Indian towns and their inhabitants. One of my favorite bits was when Goyo Yic, having restored his sight, falls in with a friend who intends to transport and sell a big barrel of liquor. They establish strict ground rules that anyone who wants a drink will have to pay for it--no freebies--with the result that the two friends pass back and forth the same handful of coins, thus drinking the whole barrel and growing no richer.

This is a dense, dense, dense, rich novel. The number of footnotes on the first page alone (20!) made me laugh. Perhaps following them more closely, or knowing more about the myth and iconography of Guatemala, would have made Men of Maize a more legible and perhaps more enjoyable experience. But I was captivated enough by the strange music of it, and its jungle of images, its poor Indians and coyote-men and tecun women and fairy wizards. 

With the addition of Guatemala, my "Countries Read" list is up to 112! If I continue on reading one new country a month as I have been, it'll take me about six more years.

The Dazzling Paget Sisters by Ariane Bankes

What elusive quality is it that propels people into the centre of things? My mother, Celia Paget, and her identical twin sister Mamaine seemed to possess that quality, to gravitate towards the very heart of the era in which they lived. Born in 1916 and brought up in relative simplicity in rural Suffolk, their lives became entangled with some of the most remarkable figures of the twentieth century, whether as friends or lovers, muses or wives.

The Paget sisters were identical twins who went from reluctant debutantes to society darlings, eventually becoming enmeshed in the social circles of England's greatest mid-century authors. Celia was a longtime lover of George Orwell, while her twin sister Mamaine was the lover and eventually wife of Orwell's friend and intellectual rival Arthur Koestler, the Hungarian emigre known for his novel Darkness at Noon. Mamaine carried on a brief, torrid affair with Albert Camus, and around the margins of their lives other literary greats hung: Beauvoir and Sartre, of course, as well as Andre Malraux and others. The Dazzling Paget Sisters, written by Celia's daughter Ariane Bankes, seeks to discover what it is that drew her mother and aunt "into the centre of things."

What that "elusive quality" was, I'm not quite sure. Apparently (as one can tell easily from the cover) both twins were quite beautiful, and they had a kind of twinly, otherworldly connection with each other. The question seems like a powerful one--why would these two ordinary girls from Suffolk end up so wrapped up with the century's literary greats?--but Bankes' biography mostly has the effect of demythologizing the very question she poses. The answer seems to be part privilege and part happenstance: the girls were "picked up" by a society maven named Dick Wyndham, who introduced them to these writers. As the story of their lives unfolded, I began to understand their lives not as a series of unlikely brushes with greatness, but something more ordinary: these writers, of course, all knew each other, and it stands to reason that their social circle included people who weren't writers.

What I enjoyed most about The Dazzling Paget Sisters was learning more about the emerging tensions between this circle as the Cold War began. Koestler in particular, who modeled Darkness at Noon on the Soviet gulag, spared no mercy for his fellow writers who let their Socialist sympathies lead them toward the USSR. This led to both Koestler and Mamaine becoming, half-willingly, useful operatives for the CIA, something I wish the book had explored in more detail. And I was interested, of course--who wouldn't be--in the doomed romantic dalliance between Mamaine and Camus, under Koestler's nose. But mostly, I felt that The Dazzling Paget Sisters might have been better served by an author other than Celia's daughter, who approaches the material in a hyper-faithful chronological way that never quite penetrates the surface. It made me wonder if someone with more of an outside perspective, with less loyalty to the letter of the story, might have found a way in to the real "centre of things."

The Means of Escape by Penelope Fitzgerald

She let her thoughts run free. She knew perfectly well that Savage, after years of enforced solitude, during which he had been afforded no prospect of a woman's love, was unlikely to be coming to her room just for a bundle of clothes. If he wanted to get into bed with her, what then, ought she to raise the house? She imagined calling out (though not until he was gone), and her door opening, and the bare shanks of the rescuers jostling in their nightshirts--the visiting preacher, Mr Luke, her father, the upstairs lodgers--and she prayed for grace. She thought of the forgiven--Rahab, the harlot of Jericho, the wife of Hosea who had been a prostitute, Mary Magdalene, Mrs Watson who had cohabited with a drunken man.

The title story of Penelope Fitzgerald's The Ways of Escape concerns a young Australian girl who discovers an escaped convict hiding in a rural church. Dressed in a hood, she can't see his face, and so she is able to project her young desires and fears onto him--not that he's young or handsome, exactly; she never rises quite to that level of imagination, but that he's arrived to carry her away on a tide of romance, in its older meaning. She waits for him to climb into her bedroom for a set of clothes as promised, but he never shows, and she discovers in the morning that he's run off with a much older servant woman.

This ending is a little too much of a punchline; it doesn't do justice to Fitzgerald's powers of plotting. But the story works because Fitzgerald captures young Alice's perspective so well: never over-wild, but callow and apprehensive, perhaps even purposely refusing to follow the line of her thoughts in order to let the mysterious event of her life happen. The convict has an analogue in the title character of "The Red-Haired Girl," a servant and painter's muse who ends up sacked for petty theft--how paltry the objects of our fascination turn out to be! But there's real magic, too, to be had, as with the title character of "Beehernz," a reclusive conductor living on a remote Scottish isle who is convinced to return and conduct a major orchestra because of the simple folk song idly sung by a woman who seems to the story in other ways entire irrelevant.

I really loved "Desideratus," a story about a poor boy who loses a precious medal--there's the great Penelopean image of the boy discovering the medal at the bottom of a puddle and ice and having to return after the thaw, only to find it gone--and then traces it to a wealthy estate, where a rich man pries the medal from the hands of his ill son. We never find out why the son was sick (did it have something to do with the ice and the thaw?) or whether the rich man is serious when he asks if the poor boy would trade the medal for a sum of money. We never find out anything else at all, because the lives of the rich and poor have only intersected here, once, obliquely, and then sundered to remain at arm's length.

But I must admit my favorite was "The Axe," a gruesome little ghost story framed as a memo from a middle manager to his boss, who has forced him to fire a long-time employee. That employee reemerges at the office with his neck severed, as if with the proverbial axe, and the middle manager rushes to his office, where, we learn, he's been writing the memo the whole time, not knowing whether the bloody apparition is still on the other side of the door. Fitzgerald was always so clever--and yet her work hardly ever seems too-clever or too neat; cleverness is always in service to a real human feeling. I'd long ago finished her novels, so it was a real treasure to discover this collection of stories, which I didn't even realize existed--none, perhaps, has quite the impact of her longer work, but it was great to luxuriate again in the work of such a peerless writer.

The Cat at the End of the World by Robert Perisic

Cats confused people. Not just those on the island who had never seen the animals, but also the Greeks who had taken them from the Egyptians--because that was not long ago, they were not used to them yet. They were the first ungovernable animals that made friends with the humans. When humans stood before cats, they did not see their own purpose.

In ancient Syracuse, a slave boy named Kalia becomes attached to a cat named Miu. Miu is a novelty among the Greeks, a strange creature brought from Egypt, where it's rumored they worship this strange, aloof creature. Miu is badly mistreated by the son of Kalia's owner, and the stark contrast between the freedom in the cat's bearing and Pigras' controlling nature awakens Kalia to the injustice of his own state as a slave. Hiding out in a barn, he ends up absconding on a ship with Miu--and a donkey named Mikro--on its way to the Adriatic coast, where Sicilian Greek settlers intend to set up a new polis. Kalia, Miu, and Mikro all become founding members of this new city, and it is through this new enterprise that Kalia comes to understand the nature of political and social life.

The third-person Kalia sections are interspersed with first-person observations by "Scatterwind," a creature who is made of the wind, if such a thing can be possible--even Scatterwind admits that to use the term "I" seems a bit out of place. Scatterwind, a relative perhaps of the bag of winds that sent Odysseus' men scrambling across the Mediterranean, is a keen observer of human (and animal) life. Because he is immortal, or at least long lived, he looks down at Kalia and the building of the polis with a kind of bird's-eye view that allows him to understand better how it expresses the nature of humans to collaborate and contest. Much of human behavior is inexplicable to Scatterwind, and his theories don't always pass muster: his accounting for love, for instance, emerges from the need for energy in the form of heat. And yet, his perspective puts the travails of one slave, one cat, and one donkey into a larger context of human flourishing and behavior.

The Scatterwind sections are, I think, the most novel and effective part of A Cat at the End of the World. I enjoyed the story of Kalia escaping with Miu, and the way that the plight of the domestic animals helps him understand his own place in the world and expand his sense of humanity and justice. The novel loses its energy a little, I think, as soon as the boat arrives on the Illyrian coast. There are excellent elements, great characters--the obsessive city planner whose exile from his polis is tantamount to a death sentence, the gruff-with-a-heart-of-gold former soldier missing an arm--but not having the wider perspective of a Scatterwind, I had trouble understanding the dynamic of the city's growth and the conflicts inherent to it. Kalia grows, becomes an adult, obtains a wife and has children, but these things are, even in a 400 page book, zoomed through so hastily I had a hard time integrating them to the story as a reader. But through it all there is Miu, the refugee, whose proud independence and nobility serve as a counterweight to shifting allegiances and philosophies.

With the addition of Croatia, my "Countries Read" list is up to 111!

Getting to Know the General by Graham Greene

The novel On the Way Back nagged at me night and day on my return to France. Those characters which I had so mistakenly drawn from life wouldn't let me rest. I would constantly remember Chuchu's boast, "I'm never going to die"; is complex theology--"I believe in the Devil. I don't believe in God," and the way that he would prove the existence of the Devil by pushing at a swing door in the wrong direction. The General and Chuchu went on living, far away in Panama, and they refused to become characters in my novel. And Panama--so much of the little country had still been left unseen and it seemed highly unlikely that I would ever be able to return for a second visit.

In the 1970's, Graham Greene received a call inviting him to the small Central American nation of Panama. The request came from no other than General Omar Torrijos, Panama's recently installed leader. Torrijos, it seems, was sort of an odd duck: not explicitly Marxist but having come to power in a coup against Panama's right-wing regime, a passionate believer in social democracy but not in partisan or sectarian politics. His core issue is the return of the Panama Canal to Panamanian control. Arriving in Panama City, Greene finds himself immersed in a world of intriguing figures: Sandinistas and Somozans working against each other in nearby Nicaragua, right-wing journalists, scheming viziers. But at the heart of it all is Torrijos, who turns out, in Greene's telling, to be a simple and humble person who only wants to spend a little time with what he sees, through Greene's novels, as a kindred spirit.

I'm reaching a bittersweet age where I'm exhausting all my favorite novelists, so it was heartening to calculate recently that, at the rate of one book a year, I can be reading Graham Greene into my fifties, even if I have likely read all of his best works. I was drawn to Getting to Know the General because I'd never read one of Greene's non-fiction books, and I was interested to see what it was like for Greene becoming, in a way, a character from his own books. In fact, for the length of his time in Panama, which includes sporadic journeys over a period of five or six years, Greene is writing a book in his head based on the General and his right-hand man Chuchu. (Despite his expressions of admiration for Torrijos, it seems like most of Greene's time in Panama is spent with Chuchu.) The book, called On the Way Back, is doomed to never be written. Perhaps the real people crowded out the fiction, or perhaps Greene simply got too deeply integrated with his Panamanian friends to cultivate the necessary distance to write his novel.

The subtitle of the book, after all, is "The Story of an Involvement," and Greene did get involved: several times he describes, with offhand diffidence, lending his efforts to negotiating for the liberation of hostages taken by Central American guerilla groups. Greene is there in the room when the treaty between Torrijos and the Carter administration that provides for the return of Panamanian sovereignty to the Canal Zone; it's fascinating to see him look witheringly at some of the assembled slaughterers, like Pinochet and Henry Kissinger. Novel, too, to read about his friendship with "Gabo," Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who ends up as a kind of Latin-American counterpart in the light intrigues that Torrijos extracts from Greene.

So, as much as anything, Getting to Know the General is a fascinating document that captures a little-remembered slice of 20th century history. But it's a pleasure, too, in the way that Greene lends his cosmopolitan eye and ear to the natural and cultural landscapes of Panama: its islands, its mountains--like the one that will ultimately take the General's life in a suspicious plane crash--its towns, its rundown hotels and haunted houses, its terrible food and vile rum punches.  

The Evening Wolves by Joan Chase

From the beginning Dad said Gloria would bring a ray of sunlight into our darkness. He warned us to find the same star--win her heart or hitch up to the next wagon West. Sometimes it's dazzling, Gloria up in the morning, dressed to the nines for ham and eggs. Ready for a date if one should come knocking, lipstick prints on the coffee cups. Gloria has done us the great favor of leaving her wonderful home and responsible job for a thankless task. She did it of her own free will, including giving up smoking, although I think nothing is quite what she expected. Still, she can say, "I always wanted a family of my own," real tears and her smile breaking together. I can't think what it will come to and I wring my hands, avoiding her eyes. Sometimes she says I'm laughing at her, but I don't think so, although I don't always know what comes over my face when I'm not looking.

Francis Clemmons is red-haired, with the fiery personality to match, and so is Gloria--a perfect match. But Gloria doesn't quite know what she's getting into with Francis' children. The young boy--to young to remember his late mother--is no problem, really, but the two girls, Margy and Ruthann, are headstrong.  Francis handles them with the power of a mad king, making elaborate jokes, pouring cereal over their heads when they complain about being hungry, leaving them on the side of the road when they provoke his ire. (It's hard not to see, though I am constantly reminded of it, the tyrannical father of Christina Stead's The Man Who Loved Children, though deep down we sense that Francis is a good and caring father, unlike Stead's.) The girls, for their part, give as good as they get. They grow up in this unusual household, become young adults with sexual yearnings, and Gloria is only partly capable of giving the guidance that they miss from their mother. A family that can be made can be unmade, too, and soon the two girls are off on their own, sundering the fragile ecosystem that the five had built.

I really loved Joan Chase's During the Reign of the Queen of Persia. It is, I believe, the only other novel that Chase wrote in her lifetime. It also tells the story of a big family, but it's fun trick is that it is narrated by all the family's young girls at once, in a "we" that can be split or combined as needed. Here, the narrative skips much more ordinarily through a series of first person narratives: Margy, Ruthann, Gloria, Tommy--though never Francis. This choice, in fact, is one of the reasons that the novel doesn't really seem to work. The novel is so fragmented, so hectic, that I felt as if I hardly knew what was going on, and I didn't get much out of the choice to depict the same moments from the perspectives of different characters. The two girls, I found, were not different enough, and they all share their father's elliptical, allusive speech, that made it hard to distinguish one from the other. Eventually I understood that Ruthann is more studious and more beautiful, more precociously sexual but also tormented by it--she marries a preacher to expiate her guilt over losing her virginity--while Margy is more lumpen, more aloof. But they both sounded a little too much like Francis, who perhaps sounds too much like Joan Chase.

Chase was an excellent prose writer, and I enjoyed the headlong flow of the sentences, which can be quite beautiful even as they borrow liberally from stock phrase and cliche ("win her heart or hitch up to the next wagon West") but the "big picture" was entirely lost on me. Big jumps in time, the introduction of new characters--it all gets lost in the thicket of language. It's hard to say exactly why this novel fails when The Queen of Persia works so well. Partly it's the point-of-view choice, but that's not it entirely. Perhaps it all comes down to the suspension of disbelief and the persuasion of character; I never really felt these characters were anything but curtain-thin. In The Queen of Persia everything comes together to give the illusion of a wholeness, a whole family--but the fractured, broken family of The Evening Wolves never has that kind of wholeness.