All happy families are not alike. Thank goodness.

Saffy’s Angel and Indigo’s Star, by Hilary McKay

These books could not have come along at a better time in my life. I’m six months pregnant with my first child, and terribly worried that I will be a bad mother. In fact, the first thought that occurred to me when I found out that I was with child (well, after the one that sounded something like “EEEEEEEE!” and caused me to lock my keys in my car outside of the gas station where I took the test) was, “Oh no. I can’t be a mother. I don’t know the names of all the plants that are indigenous to Georgia. I don’t know how to roast a turkey. I don’t really even know the right way to separate my laundry.” This led to my rushing out to read a bunch of Audubon Society field guides, cookbooks, and housekeeping manuals, none of which did very much to soothe my anxieties.

It turns out that I should have been reading Hilary McKay. Thank goodness for Eve Casson – a loving, attentive mother who still doesn’t remember to buy groceries most weeks, much less cook regular meals with them, and whose foggy ideas of housekeeping involve pouring oil paints down the kitchen drain. Thank goodness for the whole, imperfect Casson clan, from boisterous, cantankerous Rose to sunny, scattered Caddy. In these two books (and I can’t wait to read the third installment, Permanent Rose), McKay has created that most elusive of settings: a happy household. Along the way, she also disproves Tolstoy’s famous maxim – that all happy families are alike – by creating a happy family which (like most happy families, actually) is unlike any other family in the world. 

To call the Cassons a happy family, however, is not to imply that they are without their sorrows, some of which are even brought about by other members of the family. But the Cassons tackle these problems with the same love and fierce loyalty that sets them apart from so many other families, both fictional and real. Unsurprisingly, it is also McKay’s love for and
loyalty to her characters that sets her apart as an author. In the hands of a lesser artist, a character like Bill Casson, the absent, adulterous father, would come across as a monster. McKay writes him so sensitively, though, that we are forced to conclude, with Rose, that he is “both good and bad.”    

It is not only in characterization that McKay’s talents shine. Stylistically, her prose is a miracle of luminous understatement. Take, as an example, the passage in which we learn of Bill’s  infidelity. Listing the location of each family member, McKay tells us,

“Bill himself was at a London exhibition. [`Pre-opening drinks, darling,’ he had explained (not to Eve). `May meet someone useful.’ `Off you go then, darling,’ said Darling.]”

Like the visual artists she writes about, McKay uses negative space to impart the most important, emotionally resonant information. In this parenthetical aside, she reveals that Rose’s worst fears are true: her father has abandoned Eve (and the family) for a new darling. Like an unwanted confidence, the reader is burdened with this information long before the rest of the Cassons learn of it, and she is free to speculate on the disastrous repercussions it will bring about in the Casson household.

When Darling is finally revealed to Eve and the children, however, (in one of Bill’s poignantly clueless bits of dialogue – “You must both come up to London and meet my …  er …  my …  er … my …  er …  Samantha!”), each character’s reaction is typically unpredictable. And in typical Casson form, they absorb the news, reorder their lives to make room for the new information, and then go on loving one another as much as before.

We should all be so wise - whether we know how to sort the laundry or not. 

Comments

[Laura Crossett]

I loved Saffy's Angel, and now I am desperately waiting for Indigo's Star to return to the library (or, I suppose, to get around to going to some other library to check it out). Glad to meet another fan--and to find said fan has such a great blog. Actually, I found this blog via Tinfoil + Raccoon, but I'm behind on my blog-reading. . . .)

[mrsmogul]

Very cool. I will have to look in the library. I haven't been in a year!

[mrsmogul]

Very cool. I will have to look in the library. I haven't been in a year!