A Death in the Family [Paperback]

The story takes place in 1915 in Knoxville, Tennessee, where Jay Follet, an ordinary man approaching middle age, lives with his wife Mary and their two small children, Rufus, who is about six, and Catherine, who is almost four. One night he gets an anxious telephone call from his brother Ralph beckoning him to the bedside of their ailing father, who appears to be at death's door. Jay agrees to go, and in an excellent scene in which Mary makes breakfast for him before his departure, the reader gets a clear view of the kind of relationship they have. The alarm turns out to be a false one, but death is still in the cards: Returning home, Jay is killed in a car accident.

The rest of the novel demonstrates the sudden impact on Mary and her well-meaning family. Her aunt Hannah is the most helpful and the most sympathetic to her piety; her father is an agnostic who takes a practical view of things while her partially deaf mother listens through an ear trumpet; her brother Andrew tries to console her by explaining the relatively merciful circumstances of Jay's death with an interesting forensic reconstruction of the accident. Andrew is a cynic who seems to derive his personality from his father; he is quick to detect sanctimoniousness and sourly decries the priest who refuses to give the unbaptized Jay full burial rites. And, in regard to a difficult telephone conversation with Jay's inarticulate brother, he delivers the novel's best line: "Talking to that fool is like trying to put socks on an octopus."

The text of the novel is interspersed with sections relating the young Rufus's memories of growing up and perspective on his father's death, the seriousness and finality of which he is not quite old enough to understand. There are nostalgic scenes depicting days and nights on the Knoxville streets, his expectations of a "surprise" which turns out to be the birth of his younger sister, an epiphanous lesson on race relations from his black nurse Victoria, the torment and ridicule he suffers from older, bigger boys when he starts school, and, most piquant of all, a Charlie Chaplin film to which his father takes him.

Although religion plays a role, the novel is not filled with uplifting, hyperreligious cliches that try to find some higher purpose in the tragedy. Agee explores trauma and grief with the hard eye of a playwright, rendering his novel warm but not sentimental, melancholy but not depressing or humorless, melodramatic but not hysterical. "A Death in the Family" is as pure an elegy on the American family as any the previous century could conceive.

As the book starts off, a boy is making a trip to town with his dad. The boy worries about making his dad proud. The dad worries about his boy's perception of him. The dad is also incredibly lonely...and you begin to get attached to him, but you don't want to get too attached because you know he won't be around too much longer. (My apologies if this ruins the story, but I'm pretty sure this is well known.)

As you become introduced to the rest of the characters, you realize that everyone is honorable (for the most part) and that their internal concerns & worries just comes out of their being human. For example, though the father is lonely, it's not because he has a horrible wife. In fact, he has a wonderful wife...but he is trying to wade through the complexity of relationships, internal peace and life in general. And so are all the characters.

The story progresses slowly, predictably, and you watch as the characters all act & react in various ways. Agee allows you to see the world through each character's eyes, and then how the world perceives that character. This narrative style leaves you feeling compassionate for each member of the family whereas it would normally be easy to be annoyed with or dismissive of many of the characters.

It is also worth mentioning how honest and thoughtful Agee is in showing his characters' motivations and flaws. When the little boy learns that his father has died, the loss completely goes over his head. Instead, he tries to leverage this event for popularity from the schoolchildren. "Surely they will be nice to me today," he thinks.

Later, when the mother kneels to pray, her aunt has amazing insight that the mother is praying not from her heart but rather from pride - praying what she thinks a holy woman would pray in such a circumstance. Such commentary on our actions and motivations can hit a little close to home...but I believe it must have come from his own experience. He never condemns his characters...he just lets them be fully human.

As I said in the beginning, I believe this work to be a true masterpiece. Though I was often horrified by the true despairing picture he portrayed, my mind was also deeply impressed by the truth he conveyed. And he does give hope, after his own fashion.