When JD Salinger introduced Glass, the family of gifted misfits that threads through his stories becomes a case study in how genius can collide with dysfunction. Bessie and Les Glass, retired comedians, stand as a quirky, imperfect duo whose flaws illuminate the stubborn energy of a clan that is easy to judge and difficult to understand. Yet this flawed clan gives rise to characters whose oddities feel inevitable, as if their very oddness is the engine that drives the drama forward.
Tolstoy’s families in contrast to Anna Karenina remind readers that all functional families share a certain sameness, while dysfunctional ones each carve out their own path. In such stories, limitation becomes a catalyst for invention. The very energy that unsettles the domestic sphere allows its members to dodge tradition and tyranny, existing instead in the shared judgment of a community that never tires of scrutinizing them. As social modes shift in the United States—from a beatnik to a hippie era—literature turns its gaze toward what happens when family becomes a flexible, even precarious, institution.
The Glass family seeds a vast landscape of characters and even clusters of invented kin. The archetype found in Wes Anderson’s films—a careful mirroring of eccentric, almost archetypal families—shows how cinema recycles this impulse. Anderson’s Asteroid City, with its constellation of lost families intersecting with other lost kin, dramatizes the loneliness of an isolated world that a fractured clan can share. Could such cross pollination ever happen in a serious, almost scientific contest of intellects?
In modern and postmodern fiction, the dysfunctional family captures the pulse of its era. It can mirror the delicate balance of power among its members while signaling the broader shifts in the society surrounding them. Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections stands as a touchstone in this regard, presenting an aging middle class wrestling with sedatives, attention gaps, and the pressure to stay productive. The narrative situates the family within the larger frame of social change, showing how personal decline and collective anxieties reflect the times.
Andrew Ridker, a young New York writer born in the early nineties, joins this lineage with an intention to speak to a generation asking what families mean amid the pressures of money, fame, and moral ambiguity. The novel The Altruists, from Random House, pursues a serious meditation on ambition and kinship. The book follows Maggie, a sister whose extraordinary luck shapes her choices, and Ethan, a brother who seeks purpose through saving and proving his own existence. The father embodies a paradox: a protector who rages against the wind of adolescence while clinging to a rebellious, absurd spirit. The result is a portrait of a family both comic and grave in its search for meaning.
far from satire
In the wake of national tragedies that shift cultural discourse, the idea of dysfunctional satire takes on a heavier weight. The legacy of violence and shock reshapes how readers see the lighter, more ironic tones of family satire. Ridker’s debut navigates this tension with a careful balance of humor and gravity, revealing how a family can navigate the temptations of excess, reckon with the redistributions of wealth and power, and still insist on a sense of belonging. The Altruists becomes a study in modern parenting, aspiration, and the cost of keeping all the plates spinning at once.
The novel moves with a brisk energy yet does not shy away from the ache that sits behind everyday bravado. It explores how the desire to belong collides with the urge to be exceptional, a collision visible in the smallest acts of generosity and the loudest refusals to compromise. This tension is a hallmark of contemporary novels about families that feel both familiar and startlingly new.
The discussion of these families extends beyond literature. It invites readers to reflect on the ways a household can be a laboratory for truth, a stage for fantasy, and a battlefield over what counts as loyalty. In these stories, the boundary between comedy and tragedy can blur, and the line between affection and judgment can shift with the seasons. The result is a portrait of family life that remains resilient, even when it seems bent out of shape by its own ambition and the pressures of the world around it.
The Altruists marks Ridker’s entry into a continuing conversation about family, society, and the pressures that shape both. It presents characters who break from convention, who chase meaning in different currencies, and who discover that the strength of a clan might lie in its willingness to endure imperfection. This is not simply a tale of misfit genius; it is a meditation on how families endure, adapt, and sometimes transform the very idea of what it means to belong. The result is a narrative that respects the intelligence of its readers while challenging them to see familiar patterns in a new light.