Family vacations may be the most hopeful ritual we have left. The idea that people of various ages should be removed from their homes, offices and schools, and corralled in some remote place where there’s essentially nothing to do — the naivete of that scheme just breaks your heart, doesn’t it?
Unless you’re traveling alone, don’t pack a copy of Mark Haddon’s new novel this summer. “The Red House” is too demanding, too absorbing and, finally, too knowing about the tensions and anxieties that attend vacations with extended family. Haddon is best known, of course, for his first book for adults, “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time” (2003), about a 15-year-old boy with Asperger syndrome. But in “The Red House,” he proves that he’s just as astute about the verbal miscues and social awkwardness suffered by anybody. Even if you don’t see your relatives in these pages, you’ll learn to appreciate their ungainly efforts to reach out and maintain those old filial bonds.
(Doubleday) - ”The Red House: A Novel” by Mark Haddon.
(©Rory Carnegie/Doubleday) - Bestselling writer Mark Haddon.
The situation described here is artificial, but no more so than any other trip to a new locale with extended family. Six weeks after the death of their mother, Richard invites his estranged sister, Angela, to spend a week with him at a rental house in Hay-on-Wye on the border of Wales. He’s a busy, well-off doctor; she’s a harried schoolteacher. It’ll be fun: a chance to smooth out “all that hardwired sibling friction.” But they won’t be alone. Richard has recently remarried and acquired a mean-spirited teenage stepdaughter in the bargain. And Angela is bringing her husband and three children.
There’s something of a lifeboat drama about this setup: eight wary strangers thrown together with a dangerously limited supply of affection. None of these innocent vacationers seems particularly troublesome or unusual, but before their voyage is over, alliances will be drawn and redrawn, secrets revealed, conflicts brought flaming to light. This is a story full of intimate confessions that at first relieve and then frighten.
What holds our interest is Haddon’s extraordinary sympathy, his ability to reveal what stirs these people beneath their congenial holiday faces. Each of them has put a life on hold for this pleasant vacation, but even without good cellphone reception or Internet access, you know how impossible it is to sever the tendrils of home. Richard is dogged by a malpractice case that could ruin his career. His spiteful stepdaughter may have driven a classmate to suicide with a sexting prank. Angela is haunted by a stillborn baby no one else in the family even remembers anymore, and her husband is determined to break off an affair with a troubled woman in his office.
Croquet, anyone?
While those dramas play out in their minds, the action takes place among these family members trying their best to get along in the rental house. How do good people overcome decades of bitterness that have calcified into formal friendliness? “I have difficulty believing that Richard and I are actually related,” Angela tells her husband. It’s such a brilliant portrayal of the asymmetric nature of resentment within families — a crash course in sibling dynamics, when even apologizing can spark a new battle. Angela wants to unpack all the old claims stored up while their parents were dying, but Richard, conveniently, just wants to play the gracious host. “It was like contaminated earth,” he thinks, “if you didn’t dig there was no problem. . . . He didn’t want to settle scores. He simply wanted things to be neatly folded and put to sleep.” But, of course, that magnanimous position is no solace to the sibling who’s been nursing her wounds all these years.
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