Family is understood as an integral part of the American identity. The inability to measure up to an idealized picture of the nuclear family provides fodder for a multitude of hilarity and sorrow, both in pop culture and in the privacy of personal life. "The Brambles" by Eliza Minot, sister of author Susan Minot whose delicate "Monkeys" (another book about family) is superbly haunting, is a novel about family. Its strength, however, lies in the disparate lives of the family members and how loosely their worlds align.
Margaret, Max, and Edie Bramble are all grown up. Although geographically within range of one another, their lives are separate for the most part, overlapping at holidays and the birthdays of nieces and nephews. What brings them together within the framework of the novel, however, is the imminent death of their father.
As the story unfolds and Arthur Bramble is transported from California to live with Margaret in New Jersey, the reader is made privy to the internal lives of the siblings. The entrances that Minot gives the reader into her characters' minds are canny. It becomes clear, however, that each of the Brambles has built a fortress around his or her inner life and is stuck on auto-pilot. Unfortunately, Minot does not drive her characters toward revelation. There are moments of introspection, but these do not provide enough momentum for the reader to willingly seek a conclusion either.
The emptiness that the Brambles can't place manifests in Margaret as an inexplicable desire for a fourth child. She is a busy suburban mother, her husband is "perfect in his imperfections," and she shoulders the primary burden of caring for her dying father.
Edie's compensation comes in the form of an eating disorder. She turns to food to fill her, and then expels it because it does not provide her with what she is looking for. Minot is tenuous in her exploration of Edie's bulimia, and like many aspects of the novel, this element falls short of its possibilities.
The dramatic axis of Max's life is perhaps understandable, but certainly childish. Max has lost his job and the absence of the typical bread-winner role petrifies him. Illogically, he doesn't tell his wife Chloe that he's been fired. Wandering around New York in an effort to keep her in the dark leads to tears and tedious suspicions that he is being unfaithful.
Many of the plot elements of "The Brambles" feel forced. Minot intersperses the regularity of their lives with car collisions and a family secret that is hinted at too late. Her novel lacks consistency in its aims. Great fiction does not exclude the ordinary, but it is essential that the mundane become an instrument of the storytelling and not the result. Too often Minot interrupts the pensive continuum with an ill-conceived surprise.
Nonetheless, the internal worlds that the reader experiences inside the characters' minds are beautifully constructed. Minot has an apt grasp of human complexity. She deftly tracks actions back to the multitude of thoughts that preceded them. The illogical and even destructive routes that her characters follow begin to be comprehensible, once inside their heads. But something about the Brambles never catches. The lives that fill these pages are not uninteresting, but they do little to compel the reader forward even at the height of the dramatic climax.
What is portrayed most effectively in "The Brambles" is the feeling that family is fractured. Minot's success lies in her entrance into her characters' heads, and the strength of their internal lives starkly separates them from the family around them. After a point, their ties are obligatory. This is not to say that the reunions and memories they share are inconsequential, but it is a reminder that while blood may serve as common ground, it cannot compensate in itself for the distances between one person and another.