Put a dysfunctional family on your nightstand

Referring to Tolstoy—and his Anna Karenina—we can say that all functional families are alike—do they exist when they exist?—but the dysfunctional ones each have their own. Fortunately. Because what makes them dysfunctional is what allows their members – and there is no distinction here, for fathers are as obtuse and strange as mothers and sons and daughters – to escape any tradition or tyranny. Only in the collective or domesticated opinion. Perhaps the moment the family disappeared as an institution in the United States—when the beatnik, then the hippie, made it supple and even turned it into something undesirable—literature sought to understand what would become of it.

The Glass has given birth to hundreds of other characters and entire families, the most famous being as it is almost a copy of The Tenenbaums written by Wes Anderson. In fact, the filmmaker has a particular affinity for extraordinarily striking, rare, unique families, and not only does he include one in his works, he sometimes accumulates them, as in his latest film Asteroid City, where all families fall in love with other lost families like him, as if mixing two or three narratives at once, all the loneliness of an isolated planet that characterizes a dysfunctional family can finally be shared. But can’t such a thing happen in a (scientific and childish) genius contest?

As a modern and postmodern entity, the dysfunctional family is able to capture the moment it is going through in the world they live in, in fiction, very well. In other words, while describing the delicate balance of power among its members, it may indicate at what point this balance has deteriorated in the society in which he lives. This made Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections a sort of classic. There were problems with the sedatives of the elderly—which, though beginning to proliferate, were still something of a lurk—the lack of attention—and care—the obsession with productivity and the abandonment of a dying middle class, a middle class that seemed to exist long ago.

Most likely, Andrew Ridker, a very young New York writer – born in 1991, so he’s 32 – told himself at some point that he wanted to be like Jonathan Franzen when he grew up. Or simply, being part of the growing collection of novels about psychotic families, as Douglas Coupland, author of the bombshell All Families Are Psychotic as well as Generation X said, grew exponentially at the end of the 20th century—between the ’80s and ’90s—although AM Homes and its insane vision of the suburbs erupted at the time, stopping in the early 2000s, don’t miss it. I hope you’ll forgive us – because then not being able to adapt is no longer fun because not being able to adapt can be dangerous.

far from satire

It may have been the Columbine High School massacre, the most famous teen shoot in history, that dispelled the idea of ​​dysfunctional satire and condemned itself to take it too seriously or to disappear. Thus, Ridker’s debut novel The Altruists (Random House) has a minor miracle, for it can be as serious as the excesses of capitalist criminality – there is the holy sister Maggie, who even skips eating because she considers herself extremely lucky; And there, Ethan, who saves to feel that he exists and saves because he believes he deserves it – and – the broken engine of the person who has to provide and stops doing it: the father has turned adolescence – and at the same time retains the rebellious and absurd spirit of his dysfunctional idea.