Unlike parents when it comes to their children, novel readers are allowed to have favorite characters. This will be an impossible task for many readers of All Adults Here, in which Emma Straub switches among the perspectives of eight characters who are all endearing in their disarmingly muddleheaded or abjectly truth-seeking ways.
The notion of parental love consumes Straub's characters, and the one with the longest tenure in the parenting game is Astrid Strick, a 68-year-old widow who, as All Adults Here begins, watches an empty school bus plow down Barbara Baker, a fixture in their Hudson Valley town of Clapham. Although Astrid didn't like Barbara--"not for a single day of their forty-year-acquaintance," Straub writes in her deliciously withering opener--the death forecloses Astrid's chance to resolve something with Barbara that happened decades earlier and concerned Astrid's eldest child, Elliot. Nevertheless, Astrid feels obliged to interpret Barbara's death as a prompt to forge a less steely persona, and she takes the opportunity of a family brunch to tell her kin that she has been in reciprocal love with a woman for the past several years.
Another secret keeper is Astrid's middle child, 38-year-old Porter, a dairy farmer who still lives in Clapham. About halfway through a pregnancy made possible by a sperm bank, Porter is leery of breaking the news to Astrid, who "did not invite intimacy the way that Porter had observed in other mothers." But Porter must concede that her mom's confession was like a cattle prod: "If Astrid Strick could find love again, against all odds and personality deficits, then maybe Porter could too." She looks up her high school boyfriend, whose marriage didn't stop her from sleeping with him in recent years, so why should it stop her now?
No better at leaving his adolescence behind is Astrid's youngest child, Nicky. Although, unlike his siblings, Nicky has gotten out of Clapham, his responsibility-avoidant pastimes include smoking lots of pot. When his 13-year-old daughter, Cecelia, gets in trouble at her Brooklyn school, Nicky and his wife hand her off to her grandmother Astrid, so that the girl can make a fresh start at Clapham Junior High. Cecelia has a different read: "Her parents needed a time-out from being parents."
Cecelia's late-summer arrival in Clapham, like Barbara's death, launches All Adults Here, some of whose fine moments are gasp-worthy, as when a character in one story line turns out to be a key player in another. Straub, the author of the novels Laura Lamont's Life in Pictures, The Vacationers and Modern Lovers, belongs in the company of Cathleen Schine, Tom Perrotta and other fiction writers who understand that the degree of humor that can be teased from family drama is often directly proportional to the extent of the family's misery. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer
Shelf Talker: Straub's unhappy-family novel revolves around a sympathetic cluster of maturity-challenged adults and a teenager who is arguably the most grown-up among them.