In Family We Trust
A Review by Anna Godbersen

The Saperstones, around whom Nicholas Delbanco's The Vagabonds centers, are not an unusual family. At the time of mother Alice's death, the three adult siblings are scattered at opposite ends of the country. The eldest is messy Joanna, who smokes and runs a bed-and-breakfast on Cape Cod; the middle child is the perfectionist Claire, who lives with her CEO husband in Ann Arbor; and the baby is emotionally unavailable David, whose last residence was Berkeley, where his last job was something very New Economy. But when they return to their hometown of Saratoga Springs to bury their mother, they will discover, among the usual grab bag of family secrets (adultery, early death) a very unusual trust. The Vagabonds of the title are not Joanna, Claire and David, but Henry Ford, Harvey Firestone, and Thomas Edison, a rather distinguished group of camping partners who went "Vagabonding" together around the time of the first world war. The jocular spirit of the group is interrupted by the events of one evening in Saratoga Springs, when a local girl follows Firestone's employee into the woods and comes back pregnant. The Vagabonds set up a trust for the child, but nearly a century of family history will keep it from being collected.

This is an interesting premise: that three earthy, liberal, middle-aged people, living at the beginning of the 21st century, will literally inherit the legacy of three captains of industry and invention from the beginning of the 20th. Unfortunately, it never becomes much more than a good idea. Delbanco writes in run-on, present tense sentences that have a certain poetry, but can also have a soporific effect. And while the lives of Joanna, Claire, and David are imagined with lavish detail, the backward glances into the lives of the Vagabonds and the more dusty Saperstone relatives feel forced and out of place.

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