Recently I had lunch with my mom. About an hour in she revealed to me that my older aunt had died, but that she was worried about mentioning it because of her own weird kind of unresolved feelings with my dad’s side of the family. She was older and quite ill, so it was not surprised or unexpected, but it weighed on my mom in a weird way. In this novel, a middle-aged woman on the cusp of a trip out of town also sits […]
Dissection of Dysfunction
Paula Fox’s 1976 novel examines one family’s intense and contentious relations with each other. While the hurt, anger and divisions have been years in the making, all it takes is one dinner together and its aftermath for the reader to gather the depth of the discord and the underlying reasons for the dysfunction. The Maldonada family, as one might guess from the name, is both Spanish and “given toward evil” — a very poor translation of what I think that name means. Evil is too […]