Order is restored: the parents are back where we first met them, still arguing about the old characters, including the “lunatic” uncle who was not a lunatic—whether he was reactionary or bourgeois, a phony or a genuinely nice fellow, like Silvio, Lidia’s deceased brother, a person she has been evoking as the gold standard for niceness throughout the book. Somehow the threads lead where they should, backwards and forwards, complicating and simplifying, confounding and reassuring. “How many times have I heard her tell that story!” Beppino cries, as if repetition and restoration were not the signal features of their experience—the keys to their survival. The two parental figures are old and have suffered greatly, their habitual sayings are tinged with an unmistakable melancholy, and yet the rehearsed lines continue to assert the vital importance of continuity in the face of devastation.
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In the essay “Childhood,” Ginzburg says about her family, “we were nothing,” neither rich nor poor, Catholic nor Jewish. In that essay she characterizes her girlish apprehension of not fitting into any available category as a source of anguish, though in later years she came to prize this “nothingness” as a positive force. Noting in her education a certain “incoherence,” the absence of any defining or comprehensive ideology, she was forced to fling herself into the task of clarifying—for herself and her readers—every issue that came her way: from abortion to the way we bring up children and mourn our dead. Ginzburg often appears, whether in her fiction or in her essays, to be considering her subjects for the first time, with almost childlike freshness, a result perhaps of never having had any reliable guideposts or authoritative sources drummed into her—no ideology, no handy prefabricated formulas to consult. She starts at zero, sees what is before her, and gets to work.
To read Family Lexicon is to be reminded, again and again, of Ginzburg’s will to revisit the past not to find answers to questions but to furnish an alternative to carelessness, forgetting, and indifference. Ginzburg didn’t know how to be uplifting or optimistic, but she clung to the hope that human beings might make something of their lives by being true—true as in honest, loyal, faithful, resistant to nullity.
—PEG BOYERS
Family Lexicon Page 25