~ All Adults Here, by Emma Straub ~
This is not an ambitious, sweeping novel. It is a small story set in a small place: Clapham, somewhere in the Hudson Valley, an essentially well-to-do little town, the kind of place that has distinctive local shops to lure visitors from New York City.
In this town lives a significant proportion of the Strick family. Astrid, the matriarch, is a widow whose husband died a decade ago. Her oldest son Elliott is a real-estate tycoon on an appropriately Clapham-sized small scale, and lives nearby with his wife Wendy and wild 3-year-old twins. Astrid’s daughter Porter is 38 and runs a very successful goat farm just outside the town. Only the youngest son, Astrid’s favourite child, Nicky, lives in New York, but his daughter Cecelia is in trouble at school, so she too is packed off to Clapham for a year.
The novel has a promising start:
Astrid Strick had never liked Barbara Baker, not for a single day of their fort-year acquaintance, but when Barbara was hit and killed by the empty, speeding school bus at the intersection of Main and Morrison streets on the eastern side of the town roundabout, Astrid knew that her life had changed.
At this moment, at the age of sixty-five, it strikes Astrid that life is short and that she no longer wants to keep her new romantic relationship secret. Others have their own secrets: Elliott has bought a building and plans to rent it to a chain, which is anathema to the town buy-local movement of which Astrid is a strong part. Porter is in a relationship with a married man and wants to have a baby. Nicky avoids all conflict and leads a charmed life (as we are told multiple times), but has a fuzzy relationship with his wife.
How will Astrid’s family react to her new lover, especially when that lover turns out to be a woman? Will Porter, pregnant with a sperm-bank baby, break up with her married lover? Honestly, though, the characters are so dull and angst-ridden over their own little problems that it’s hard for a reader to care what choices they make. There is little character development or meaningful resolution of any of their problems.
Two deaths — those of the abovementioned Barbara Baker and Astrid’s husband Russell — act as catalysts for the plot, such as it is. There are many, many mentions of Russell’s passing, and how each character felt about it at the time and since.
Sometimes, when more than one of her children were in the same room, Astrid thought about their father walking in — their father, her husband, Russell, who hadn’t made it to the twenty-first century, who had never had a cellphone.
Nicky was a senior in high school then, the star of the spring play, and Porter was twenty, fat and happy from beer and independence in the dorm. Or at least she had been happy, until Russell died.
Her mother and Russell now lived in the same neighbourhood of her mind, which felt like a remote Norwegian fjord.
and so on. And on. And on.
This is the small story of a small family in a small town, but it is astonishing how many social ‘issues’ are packed into the novel. Bisexuality, adultery, transgender, single parenting, bullying, artificial insemination, online dangers, teenage bullying and cliques… all addressed summarily with little depth.
Even the most dedicated parent will tire of Astrid’s endless angst about her parenting, and the similar agonies of each character about their own parents. Porter is still bitterly resentful about the fact that ‘most people got to keep both their parents’. Elliott and Porter are both aggrieved about Astrid’s favouritism of Nicky. Cecelia is furious with her parents for yanking her out of her school and sending her to Astrid’s.
Perhaps I would be more tolerant of their self-absorbed navel-gazing in a different time, or if I hadn’t just read the wonderful Little Family in which the characters draw happiness from their lives even in fairly grim circumstances.
All Adults Here is, at best, a beach read, but much more lively fun in a similar vein can be obtained from Elin Hilderbrand’s Nantucket novels.
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