Family Pictures:

...He is their touchstone...

...Surely the strongest scene in the novel is that between the two of them which closes Part One: it is the summer of 1966, and fifteen-year-old Nina has been taken up by her nineteen-year-old brother, just back from Harvard...

...The scene is haunting, unshakable, capturing in it much that feels true of adolescence, summer, the sixties, Hyde Park, and grief, unspoken, that is too large to bear...

...Miller's device of using Nina as a photographer collecting the family pictures is particularly appropriate to her own strengths as a novelist...

...What of the children of this marriage...

...They are wearying...

...We learn the most of the two born on either side of Randall...

...that is the story Sue Miller has to tell in often powerfully drawn scenes that show how each member of the family responds to Randall, the autistic son...

...Moreover, there is a curious absence in the book, analogous to that absence Lainey is aware of in David when she turns to him in a fervour of desperate sexuality after Randall's diagnosis, when she wants to make him love her, love their flawed child, through her body...

...The extremes are more serene, or at least distant: we know less of the eldest and youngest...

...Then it had been scarred, a wasteland, the walls peeled back by the aging little boy, its only furniture a mattress on the floor covered with the red blanket that solaced him...

...We can learn from this novel, once again and perhaps in an entirely different way, the truth of Tolstoy's maxim...

...What Sue Miller does best is observe...

...This is her goodbye, this is Mack's goodbye, to the brother just sent off, Finally sent off, to a distant institution...

...There is so much explaining in them...

...She whoops, she thumps, she storms-she is a veritable Paul Bunyan of motherhood...

...That is what makes scenes such as these so powerful, so believable, and there are others-especially scenes between father and son, one of the most vivid when David, relieved to be away from the claustrophobia of Lainey's Christmas ritual, brings the eight-year-old Mack to the hospital for stitches to close the gash in his foot caused by stepping on an ornament (of course he was supposed to be wearing his slippers, but he couldn't find them) broken by Randall...

...She thrills to his notice...

...But no one goes home to Ozzie and Harriet...

...s topsy-turvy...

...L" is Lainey, David's wife and mother of, in order, Liddie, Macklin, Randall, Nina, Mary, Sarah...

...They know they are compensation...

...He and two of his friends take her to W.C...

...Perhaps their elusiveness-illusiveness, too-explains the relentlessness with which happy families have been represented on television in decades past and present...

...With as much method as they can manage, the four teenagers tear away at the wallpaper, leaving strips of it behind, a flower here, a bird there...

...Fields movies (which they are disappointed to find she doesn't get), they take her to the Point in Hyde Park, they celebrate her naivete, they offer her grass...

...David is wry, dry, has nurses on the sly...

...David is contained, a raisin of wit...

...And just what does he mean by "happy families" anyway...

...The journal also notes precisely what "L" thinks and says about the child...

...At one point, her tears threaten to dissolve the household, minus David, who has already left it...

...They enact Randall's madness at the same time they reveal it, for Nina is struck by "the odd beauty of the walls with the multiple layers of pattern and paint...

...Yet Nina is by temperament and by experience most like her brother Mack, and through her adolescence she sheds her younger sisters to form an allegiance with him, which has something to do with an allegiance to Randall as well...

...She is allied by birth order with her two younger sisters, the three little girls together making up a cohesive family unit that looks out on the rest of the family as "the giants...

...She observes meticulously...

...The greater temptation, however, is to slip back to Anna Karenina instead and find out just why everything in the Oblonsky household is topsy-turvy...

...In the first chapter of Sue Miller's second novel, Nina Eberhardt, sometimes main character, sometimes narrator, always headstrong and often wistful middle child of a family of six children, encounters an elderly former neighbor...

...For Lainey, every experience-religion, sex, motherhood-is sacramental, and she meets it fervently, trying to feed some deep need in her, already there before Randall's birth, but become desperate since it...

...His father, David, is a psychiatrist at the University of Chicago-tacked up in the kitchen is a picture of Freud, among the family pictures here-and David keeps a journal on Randall, noting from the time he is two the accomplishments and absences of "R...

...Recently redecorated with complete concessions to her coming maturity, her room was Randall's before he was sent away...

...Now it has a vanity with a flowered skirt and a three-way mirror...

...Their father is given to calling that second set of three children "the last straws," "the extras," "the unexpected guests," "the surprise party," and most pointedly, "the little pitchers of health...

...And yet the novel as a whole is curiously mechanical, and though well seen, it is often unfelt...

...This novel is long just the way Thanksgiving or a college graduation or a family reunion is long...

...Jogged, the old woman's memory lights on the image of the Eberhardt family: '"Now I remember the story...

...Lainey is omnivorous, she overflows...

...One night, thoroughly stoned themselves, they get her high, really high, on marijuana brownies, and then Mack and his two friends and Nina go upstairs to her room...

...You were the family with that tragic young retarded boy.'" For that is the way the Eberhardt family is unhappy in its own way...

...Lainey is huge, explosive, somebody Ava Gardner might have played...

...We grind through these chapters...

...In 389 pages, we end up spending a lot of time with the Eberhardt family, and, as in any family, that is not always rewarding...

...The time is the 1950s and Randall is Lainey's fault, which she promptly tries to disprove by the quick succession of three babies after Randall, whom she is at any point likely to scoop up and call "my perfect babies...

...it has wallpaper of birds on a cream background among blue and and yellow flowers...

...Reading Family Pictures is a little like sitting around the Thanksgiving Day table, too full, listening to the endless stories that are supposed to enable you to catch up on what other family members are doing-all the while the Macy's Day Parade or football games drone on in the background, and it is only four o'clock in the afternoon...

...For the novel, it is not as much as absence of heart as of art: a similar feverishness, or overinsistence, sometimes invades the narrative, the sentences choke up with the very effort of the author to tell, and there is not one to turn back to with the awe of recognition or grace...

...Nina, whose birth-and normalcy-is supposed to vindicate Lainey's role as mother after the blame accorded her for Randall, offers us our way into the family, for the novel is framed as a flashback and Nina, grown to be a photographer -hence the "family pictures" of the novel's title-controls the focus of those chapters she narrates...