FAMILY NIGHT - Hardcover

Flook, Maria

2.86

14 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679416471 ISBN 13: 9780679416470

Publisher: Pantheon, 1992

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

Obsessed with his unknown father, an ex-model for Arrow Collars, Cam, along with his stepsister, Margaret, and Margaret's boyfriend, Tracy, set out on an unpredictable journey. A first novel.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

About the Author:

Maria Flook, a 2007 Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow, is the author of the nonfiction books, My Sister Life: The Story of My Sister's Disappearance, and New York Times Bestseller Invisible Eden: A Story of Love and Murder on Cape Cod . Her fiction includes the novels Lux , Open Water, Family Night, which received a PEN American/Ernest Hemingway Foundation Special Citation, and a collection of stories, You Have the Wrong Man . She has also published two collections of poetry, Sea Room and Reckless Wedding, winner of the Houghton Mifflin New Poetry Series. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The New Criterion, More Magazine, and others. She is Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at Emerson College.

From Publishers Weekly:

In her fiction debut, Flook, the author of two poetry collections, produces finely wrought sentences, but her story falls flat. Heroine Margaret has, as the title implies, a dark relationship with her family, a tangle of step-siblings and ex-spouses. She also has a boyfriend named Tracy, a member of Sex Anonymous who engages in various forms of sexual congress with Margaret in full view of her relatives and ultimately prods her into committing incest with her stepbrother Cam. At Tracy's instigation, Margaret, Cam and Tracy seek out Cam's father, whom Cam has never met and of whom Cam knows only that he was once a model for Arrow Collars. Flook's style is frequently arresting; describing a car speeding dangerously through lanes of traffic, she writes: "It was a reverse wake, a terrible seam ripping upwards." But her version of the family romance--a catalogue of wayward deeds, odd sexual encounters, ugly secrets and uglier psychodramas--is more exhibitionistic than revelatory, and it becomes increasingly difficult to share her brittle characters' overwhelming interest in themselves.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.