Family Happiness:
Steinfels, Margaret O'Brien
Can we stand happiness? FAMILY HAPPINESS Laurie Colwin Alfred A. Knopf, $12.95, 272 pp. Margaret O'Brien Steinfels "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own...
...There is one handsome, but distracted, husband...
...The inevitability of Polly's virtue is like Iris Murdoch's "sovereignty of good" - "something of which saints speak and which any artist will readily understand...
...two grown but pathetically immature brothers...
...a crank of a father...
...He lives beyond the family's reach...
...The novel opens and closes with their ritual Sunday breakfast eaten at midday: for starters, "heavy white plates of smoked salmon, silver baskets of toast points, dishes of capers, lemon slices and scallions, and a cobalt-blue dish of nicoise olives...
...Their tribal life has not been touched by modernization except in small details...
...Happy all the time...
...The sole difference between the novel's first breakfast and last is that Polly leaves the first early, ostensibly for a meeting, but actually for a brief tryst with her lover, Lincoln Bennett...
...To her plaintive, "I don't want to be the best anymore," her adoring husband, Henry, responds, "You can't help it, it is not something you do...
...and it is easy to fall in love with the idea of the Solo-Millers...
...They celebrate holidays and spend their vacations together...
...So the epigraph to Family Happiness must serve as its conclusion: "God set-teth the solitary in families...
...In fact, in the spirit of"domestic sensuousness" that Colwin extols in her short story, "The Lone Pilgrim," Family Happiness ought to be read while reclining with pillows on a plump old couch handed down from your maternal grandmother...
...It had been said of Grandfather Solo-Miller that he behaved as if he had chosen God, and not the other way around...
...But it is very Solo-Miller...
...It's something you are...
...Family life is deflective: it gives everybody something to do...
...and "branches in Boston, Philadelphia, and New York, as well as London just like a banking house...
...Is it their alikeness that is elusive or their happiness...
...Its happiness is not the mere sum of individual happinesses, nor is its vitality threatened by passing individual miseries...
...Fealty, constancy, and excellence are the virtues of this clan...
...Anna Karenina opens with that epigram, but so could the works of Dickens, George Eliot, Ibsen, O'Neill, etc...
...It provides work, company, and entertainment...
...In addition, Polly is "sturdy, upright, cheerful, and kind...
...It makes tasks for idle hands and allows an anxious spirit to hide in its capacious bosom...
...With no one around her, Polly felt as if she had slipped out of earth orbit...
...Happy families whose good spirits we may enjoy at Christmas dinner, we will not endure for 750 pages...
...their wives...
...The diverse miseries of unhappy families grow in geometric proportion to the length of novel or play...
...two darling and wise children...
...Laurie Colwin's previous novel has the daft title, Happy All the Time...
...That is not a satisfactory ending, too much having-your-cake-and-eating-it-too...
...but the rebellious live in a dry land" (Psalm 68:6).dry land" (Psalm 68:6...
...Old, established, wealthy - financiers of the American revolution - the Solo-Millers enjoy nothing so much as their own company...
...It absorbs sadness and sops up loneliness...
...The matriarch Wendy, nee Constanzia Hendricks, and the patriarch Henry Solo-Miller, Sr., preside at the Sunday breakfast as at a high liturgy...
...nor do they divorce or approve of divorce...
...The first clause holds your attention while you try to imagine the alikeness of happy families, but its plausibility soon fades...
...The possibility that the complacence of her family has pushed her into Lincoln's bed is tested and found wanting...
...The story between is not filled with moral drama or passion but a subtle and fine moral suasion in which Polly refuses to find cause for her affair in the sometime neglect of her family...
...every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way...
...they own a Silex coffee pot, but cannot get it to work...
...YOU HAVE read that sentence before...
...The idea of a patient, loving regard, directed upon a person, a thing, a situation, presents the will not as unimpeded movement but as something very much like 'obedience.' " The ever-tasteful Sturm und Drang of the plot resolved - although her moral dilemma is not...
...The central proposition of Family Happiness is not that the Solo-Miller clan is similar to other happy families, but that the happy family ensemble has a life and rhythm of its own...
...You read, absorbed and silent, wrapped in a nineteenth-century blue and white quilt stitched by a distant cousin on her marriage trip from Philadelphia to Boston in 1854...
...A sure sign of pathology in her fiction is a bare room...
...The domestic interiors of happy families are crowded with beloved objects...
...The Solo-Millers are smug, or so Lincoln informs the uncritical Polly, and at moments are fairly wretched individuals...
...A concert or gallery opening is the occasion of a solemn procession and their single yearly attendance at synagogue on Yom Kippur "was with a sense of aristocracy...
...Polly's fall from grace is the occasion for her seeing, at last, the mixed blessing, but blessings nonetheless, of her tribe...
...Her fall from grace and complacent happiness into bewildering unhappiness and her ascent back to a guarded happiness constitute the plot...
...I finished it smiling...
...Family Happiness has some of its bedazzling qualities: not great literature but an extremely satisfying read on a cold Saturday afternoon...
...Polly Solo-Miller De-marest, daughter, wife, and mother, occupies the foreground...
...The apartments of the junior members are glowing satellites circling the parental hearth...
...Lincoln remains her lover - Polly sits at Sunday breakfast: "This was her family, her tribe, her flesh...
...The hero, a foundation president, is led in the spirit of courtly love through an excruciatingly protracted courtship while remaining ever hopeful, kind, and loyal...
...Still they are appealing...
...She felt not forced to love them, or condemned to be angry at them, but as if she were merely seeing them...
...Lincoln Bennett, a recluse and a painter, is simply the first and dearest friend she has ever had...
...Solo-Millers do not leave the family when they marry, their spouses join the family...
...But she did want to...
...Her place at this table was optional - she did not have to be there if she did not want to...
...The second clause is the stuff of great literature...
...She is Polly the Good, accomplished and virtuous be-, yond appreciating...
...Colwin is big on families and family heirlooms...
...He bringeth out those which are bound with chains...
...A novel about happy families, if it is not ironic, is necessarily brief...
...Anyone could be a Christian...
...Her heart was full of love - for Henry, for Lincoln, for her brother and sister-in-law and parents and for her children...
...Their judgments are stern and their forbearance limited...
...Not anyone could be a Jew, and very few Jews were the sort of Jews the Demarests and the Solo-Millers were...
...But her extended family is the background and anchor of the story...
...Naturally this condition poses the question that has worried all of us at some time or another, perhaps even Eve herself: is Paradise suffocating...
...in the last she does not leave...
...And later...
...a sometime neurasthenic mother...
Vol. 110 • April 1983 • No. 7
