Customer Reviews

The Whole Family: A Novel by Twelve Authors

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
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This novel was enjoyable to read. Each of the twelve writers takes a family member and tells the story of a daughter's engagement through through their eyes. The story flows together pretty well, except for the piece written by Henry James. I thought it bogged down there, and the tone was much too somber compared with the rest of the book. However, you can easily skim over that chapter and still understand the plot. I'm glad I read this book.

I am very happy to see this book available on the Kindle and to see that people are reading it! When I read it some years ago, I found it so fascinating that I did a lot of research on it, and ended up writing an entire book of cultural history. There's a whole tradition of novels written in this way, each author writing one chapter. Readers of the Kindle edition might want to know that the paper reprint also includes supporting materials that tell you a lot about the authors and about the process by which this quirky book was produced--it was originally serialized in Harper's Bazar (as the name was spelled then--same magazine though). And the contributors had a lot of disputes; the correspondence is quite funny. (Warning: self-promotion follows) Duke University Press has published both the novel (ed. Alfred Bendixen, with a short foreword by me) and my book, which is titled Publishing the Family--of course there's a short description on Amazon--pretty specialized, but I try to make it interesting! My sister advises that any readers who are not professional scholars should skip the introduction. :)

It was interesting that so many different authors could write in the same style.
Humorous to see the situation from each point of view.
I thought it would be a novel with each author building on the what the other had written, when really it was one situation told by each character.