Amy Bloom’s Favorite Family Novels

Amy Bloom’s latest novel, “I’ll Be Right Here,” tells the story of a single family across more than eight decades. The span of the book renders it, almost by definition, a portrait of how the clan’s members observe one another as the years pass. “With families, everyone is a time traveler,” Bloom writes. “If anyone in the room knew you before you were exactly who you are right now, they still see you as you were, and as you are.” Not long ago, Bloom—several of whose stories have appeared in the magazine—joined us to discuss a handful of accomplished portraits of family life: its intimacies, its irritations, and the slippery sense of time it can produce. Her remarks have been edited and condensed.

Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha

by Roddy Doyle

This is an extraordinary novel about the coming of age, in late-nineteen-sixties Ireland, of a young boy named Patrick Clarke. It traces his life at school, the changing world, the end of his parents’ marriage—all of these things that come his way. There is not as much happiness in it as one might like, not as much expressed love—it’s more about absence and bitterness and loss, and the places where love comes up to give a little light.

Paddy is an impeccably realized character. As a writer, I think that, when you’re trying to create a compelling child character, what you need are both memory and genuine empathy, and Doyle not only makes choices about language—the register and the variety of language—that allow you to hear Paddy and be with him but also really inhabits Paddy as a human being.

Pride and Prejudice

by Jane Austen

I’ve never thought that “Pride and Prejudice” was about a romance. I always thought it was about life, and money, and the idea that your family are your people. How some of them you adore, and some of them you’re, like, Oh, my Christ, how has this happened to me?

Austen makes the Bennets feel like a living family in so many ways. I love reading about Elizabeth’s friendship with her sisters, and the love and mistakes of her father. And, I mean, poor Mrs. Bennet. You know, she’s ghastly, but she’s not indifferent. As we watch Elizabeth navigate life in her social context—the financial realities of which Austen gives such a cool-eyed account—the book also becomes a wonderfully astute interweaving of moments in which the large family’s needs are as one and moments in which their needs are in conflict.

Go Tell It on the Mountain

by James Baldwin

One thing I love about many family novels is that they tend to have a nonlinear structure that echoes the mess of family life. That definitely holds true in this case. Baldwin’s book, which is about a young boy growing up in Harlem in the thirties, and which includes the various backstories of several of his family members, presents a lot of those stories in flashback, so that, although the main narrative takes place on one day, the novel stretches some seventy years. The book is about the framing of what family is, and the difference made by marriages, adoptions, abandonment, who you love, who you can count on—and the way in which those are not always the same things. But it’s also very much about how what parents experience long before we show up in the world is played out in our lives as children. Not because that is anybody’s intention but because our little, squalling selves are born to messy people.

Cold Comfort Farm

by Stella Gibbons

This is a wildly goofy novel that was published in 1932, and is a parody of a certain kind of romanticized representation of rural life that was quite popular around the time. In this version, the main character is an orphan named Flora, who decides to visit her distant relatives at the place they live, Cold Comfort Farm, which is in a village called Howling. Howling of Sussex!

Flora, who fancies herself a level-headed modern girl, decides to help bring these benighted creatures that are her relatives into the twentieth century. And her family, the Starkadders, are just endlessly appalling. One is unhealthily preoccupied with her own child, one is a good-looking guy with overactive sexual interests. There is a miserly widow named Ada Doom. They’re all just bonkers, in the most delightful and relentless way—including the cows, whose names are Graceless, Aimless, Feckless, and Pointless.

The book is so funny that one can just sort of rollick along, but I think in the end Flora probably learns some things. That people are complicated. That more than one thing can be true. And that there are things to be learned everywhere—even from family.