Family Night

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Winner of the PEN American/Ernest Hemingway Foundation Special Citation Family Night cracks open one American family and shows us the values—and the dysfunctions—that make up the gothic attractions within it.At the center of this family stands a mysterious father figure, whom Margaret and her stepbrother, Cam, have never met: All they know is that he had been a model, the last Arrow Collar Man. Tracy, Margaret’s lover, ever eager to enrich his encyclopedic awareness of fixations, cajoles Margaret and Cam into a trip to find this absent father. The Arrow Collar Man as missing patriarch.Margaret, Cam, and Tracy—themselves haunted by recent divorces, by their own children, by their undecided instincts—set out in a powder blue Plymouth Duster on an unpredictable journey through the intimacies, obligations, and obsessions that bind us to each other. Family Night is an American family romance that neither Freud nor James Cain could have imagined.From Publishers WeeklyIn her fiction debut, Flook, the author of two poetry collections, produces finely wrought sentences, but her story falls flat. Heroine Margaret has, as the title implies, a dark relationship with her family, a tangle of step-siblings and ex-spouses. She also has a boyfriend named Tracy, a member of Sex Anonymous who engages in various forms of sexual congress with Margaret in full view of her relatives and ultimately prods her into committing incest with her stepbrother Cam. At Tracy's instigation, Margaret, Cam and Tracy seek out Cam's father, whom Cam has never met and of whom Cam knows only that he was once a model for Arrow Collars. Flook's style is frequently arresting; describing a car speeding dangerously through lanes of traffic, she writes: "It was a reverse wake, a terrible seam ripping upwards." But her version of the family romance--a catalogue of wayward deeds, odd sexual encounters, ugly secrets and uglier psychodramas--is more exhibitionistic than revelatory, and it becomes increasingly difficult to share her brittle characters' overwhelming interest in themselves. Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. ReviewWinner of the PEN American/Ernest Hemingway Foundation Special Citation“Family Night is a wild book, a savage sexual roller coaster, whose ultimate destination is a quirky juncture of memory and desire, a place where the pull of family and the pull of the erotic blur together. A powerful work, exquisitely written, it captures the dark, muddy world or the carnal unconscious as well as any novel I’ve read.”—Robert Boswell, author of Crooked Hearts “Family Night, Maria Flook’s debut as a novelist, reminds me of another notable debut, Knife in the Water, Roman Polanski’s first film. In both, one feels the immediate recognition of a unique sensibility; in both, the vision is mature, taut, edgy—and both are kept on the edge by an unremitting, underlying erotic current.”—Stuart Dybek, author of The Coast of Chicago “Maria Flook’s novel goes straight to the broken heart of an American family, where its wild children take shelter in each other. This is a book of desperate moves, by a writer gifted with a fierce wit and an amazingly sweet sensuality.”—Judith Grossman, author of Her Own Terms