Balancing Acts

Three adult siblings cope with the challenges and comedy of family life.

Eliza Minot (Joyce Ravid)

THE BRAMBLES

A Novel

By Eliza Minot

Knopf. 243 pp. $23.95

Eliza Minot's delicious debut, The Tiny One (1999), was lovingly packed with the semi-autobiographical details of a child's memories of the day her mother died. The author's precocious young doppelgänger wondered "how something so big could fit into such a little thing as a day." In her graceful second novel, Minot confidently trades the fresh innocence of that girlish narrator for the frazzled intensity of Margaret Bright, a thirty-something suburban housewife. The Brambles turns the question posed by The Tiny One on its head, now asking how so many small things can fill the yawning space of a day.

A mother of three, Margaret has been "thrown into neutral" by her love for the reckless, hungry brood that is her family and the needy, terminally ill man who is her father. She struggles to make her way through the "blended doughy (Play-Dohy!) days" that vary for her in small ways but are still the same every day.

The Brambles is no pulse-racing story about the death of a patriarch and an explosive family secret; it's a leisurely, unfolding scrapbook of the thoughts and impressions of Margaret, her bulimic younger sister, Edie, and her sensitive film producer brother, Max. Max has secretly quit his job and spends his days trolling around New York's Upper West Side, hiding from his wife and child and wondering how he ended up so directionless. Edie works for a popular talk show, struggling to live among "the drone of televisions" and the deafening emptiness of her own life. Margaret is "immersed in her abundance of children" but also unprotected and alone with her self-doubts.

Minot's characters think deeply about their lives and futures as their dying father journeys to Margaret's home in New Jersey, where he will live out his final days. Minot favors the lyrical backward glance, parsing the present into finely crafted bits of memory and personal history. The forward movement of the novel -- too gentle and lazy at times -- is of secondary importance. If it weren't for Margaret's penchant for holding the slippery edges of her domestic life together with itemized lists of things to fix ("Vaguely leaking washing machine"), things to remember ("Stamp machine at the post office. Still busted") and things to fear ("Code orange? Amber alert? War"), the novel's unsatisfying conclusion might make little sense. Thankfully, Margaret makes a list to keep the convoluted story straight, "jotting down notes like she used to do during lectures in school."

Minot is an agile impressionist with a real talent for capturing the inner life of her characters. The challenge now is to craft a stronger, more textured fictional universe in which this radiant inner life may shine even more brightly. ·

Laura Ciolkowski teaches literature at New York University and is on the faculty of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at Columbia University.