The Family Tree

Rebecca Monroe is a glorious creation. The narrator of Carole Cadwalladr's debut novel -- a funny, wistful, smart book -- Rebecca is working on a PhD in cultural studies which involves placing household products and television shows into cultural context, and her analyses of these shows of the '70s and '80s pop up in various footnotes below the text. (These footnotes are gems, too -- wickedly funny observations on pop-culture.) While Rebecca is involved in sorting people from place and time, how environment shapes our conscience and personality, her husband, Alistair Betterton, a behavioral geneticist, will hear none of it. Genes are destiny, he arrogantly asserts on television specials and talk-back shows, where he is becoming quite the celebrity guest star. He is glib, charismatic, and awfully awful. Needing volunteers for his research, he doesn't blink as he books his wife in for monthly tests and questionnaires. Rebecca senses something is not quite right about her marriage, and the reader feels instant empathy for this slightly deluded, slightly insecure, completely lovable narrator.

And to complicate the nature versus nurture debate, Rebecca's family is a case in point for both sides of the argument. Her mother, Doreen, would be clearly diagnosed as manic depressive nowadays, but was more likely to be labeled neurotic in their suburban British neighborhood in the mid-1970s. In a fit of home remodeling undertaken maniacally with a sledgehammer, Doreen removes a supporting wall in the family house. She competes with her hippy sister, Suzanne, whose higher social status and wealth seems, to Doreen's eyes, vastly underappreciated (or even undeserved). Then again, Rebecca is totally dissimilar to her social-climbing sister, Tiffany, who is hilariously portrayed as an unrepentantly materialistic newspaper columnist -- the sort whose cozy anecdotes are filled with patient exasperation for her bumbling spouse, who is only ever referred to as "The Husband."

Rebecca is beguiling, her nature endearing, and her observations so funny and charming. Take this description of her experiences in a department store's communal changing room:

I'd stumbled into Hell. It was an inferno of heaving, quivering humanity that smelled of armpits and hormones and fear….a woman in a petticoat grimaced at the mirror, her face hollowed out by the fluorescent strip lighting. It was an expression I'd not see again until much later in my educational career when Mrs. Howarth put a transparency of 'The Scream' by Munch on the overhead projector.

The book slips effortlessly between the present and two periods of the past -- the 1940s when Rebecca's grandmother Alicia is prevented from marrying a man she loves, and instead is betrothed to a very peculiar first cousin. Then there is the 1970s -- Rebecca's youth -- a period in which family secrets and misunderstandings are rife. Extra-marital affairs are hinted at and family histories are veiled - all of which provokes curiosity in the pre-pubescent Rebecca. "What's incest?" she asks innocently enough one night.

Cadwalladr is a former journalist, and her skill with the written word, her deft characterization and nuanced emotion, is a combination of natural talent and rigorous training. She vividly renders moments of chaos and mania -- for example, Doreen never becomes a caricature but instead her unraveling is slippery and unpredictable -- and while she captures the obvious sorrow borne of tragedy, such as suicide, she also grasps the small, bewildering loneliness and melancholy that can exist within a marriage. Yet, for all the dense and twisted family intrigue, it is Rebecca's voice that compels and which makes this novel so satisfying and re-readable.

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