Did You Ever Have a Family by Bill Clegg (2015)

If you are looking for a cheerful, feel-good book to read, run away from this one as fast as you can. It begins with a gas explosion which kills June Reid's daughter and the daughter's fiance', her ex-husband, and her lover. Filled with sorrow and survivor's guilt, June withdraws into herself, finally leaving everything and driving to a place that had made her daughter happy.

Clegg tells his story through short chapters from the viewpoints of a large cast of characters, a good many who have suffered tragedies and losses of their own. Some chapters are written in first person, some in third person, some in past tense, some in present tense, all providing a small piece of a kind of puzzle. This makes for some awkwardness for much of the book, because some characters' stories don't initially seem to have anything to do with the central plot. It does all comes together in the end, however.

This novel has received a great deal of critical praise and was long-listed for both the Booker Prize and the National Book Award, but I feel it may have earned some of its appreciation because its author is a major literary agent, prominent in the publishing world. While the book is cleverly put together and intellectually entertaining, it seems to me to have some major flaws.

Though the plot would seem to be one to elicit extreme sympathy for the tragedy-plagued characters, the tone is curiously detached and emotionless; the first-person narrators all speak in the same voice as the third-person narrator; in describing the non-restored vintage stove that is the cause of the explosion, Clegg has combined features of mid-century stoves with pilot lights and modern electronic ignition stoves, when a vintage stove would have neither and would have to be lit with a match. This might seem to be a small detail except that much of the plot centers on how the stove came to have escaping gas.

I believe most would find this novel interesting, but it is not nearly as good as I had expected.