Finding peace in a family tree

Joan Hinkemeyer, Special to the News

Wednesday, August 10, 2005

Families can nurture or stifle, be havens or foster fear, and sometimes the same family reveals contradictory faces to different members.

Terry Gamble explores the idiosyncratic nature of family dynamics in her new book, Good Family, lending the same probing eye and lyrical voice to this novel that she employed in her well-received previous book, The Water Dancers.

Gamble examines the intricacies of four generations of the once-wealthy Addisons through the eyes of Maddie, who has been estranged from her family for 11 years. Now a documentary filmmaker in New York, the 40 year-old Maddie is summoned to the Lake Michigan summer home built by her great-grandparents in the late 19th century. There, she and her sister Dana and an assortment of cousins and their offspring await the death of Maddie's mother, the current family matriarch and the last of her generation.

The sprawling old summer home holds painful memories for Maddie, as she remembers a childhood of loneliness and disapproval in a silent family where a strict code governed appearance, activities and even choice of friends. Her most searingly painful memory, however, is of the morning she found her beloved daughter dead of SIDS.

As Maddie struggles with her conflicting memories of the past, she hopes her mother will provide answers to some of the family's many secrets, but her stroke-damaged mother no longer speaks. Instead, it's the summer place itself that offers answers and solace for Maddie because every piece of furniture, scratched door and window offers visible signs of family history.

And Maddie finally feels comfortable in her slot of the extended family when she discovers the diary of her great-grandmother, who also tragically lost a child.

Gamble gracefully weaves Maddie's story, both past and present, with that of other family members. Her alertness to the look, sound and feel of things gives a strong sense of place that helps shape the novel. It's this island enclave of old wealth where the air was often "delicious with rumor and secrecy" that forms the mother who has influenced and also stifled Maddie.

Although Maddie and her generation seek freedom in their unique ways, it's the youngest generation of teens who seem most free. They can engage life directly, whereas Maddie must view it behind the safety of a camera. Such themes make for plenty of fodder for any novelist, and Gamble has done a graceful job of providing insight, as well as intrigue.

Good Family

• By Terry Gamble. William Morrow, 318 pages, $24.95.

• Grade: B+

Joan Hinkemeyer is a Denver librarian and freelance writer.