Many years ago, a friend-of-a-friend lost her whole family in a terrible accident. To have a family one minute and lose them the next was incomprehensible. As my friend mentioned how this woman was doing in the months and years after the accident, I marvelled at how people endure the seemingly unendurable.

How do you recover from that? How would you even begin?

And this is the question at the heart of Bill Clegg’s novel, Did You Ever Have A Family.

On the eve of her daughter’s wedding, June Reid’s life is completely devastated when a house fire takes the lives of her daughter, her daughter’s fiancé, her ex-husband, and her boyfriend, Luke – her entire family, gone in an instant. June flees her small town, in a desperate bid to outrun her grief. She leaves behind a community in mourning and as time passes, the connections to those that died emerge.

She was…an untouchable. Not from scorn or fear, but from the obscenity of the loss. It was inconsolable, and the daunting completeness of it – everyone, gone – silenced even those most used to calamity.

What Clegg does very well in this novel is capture the fragile time for someone grieving, as they move between deep, deep sadness and the demands and expectations of ‘ordinary’ life. In grief counselling, this is described in the dual process model, and while I’ve read about it extensively in scholarly texts, it’s rare to see it described so eloquently in a novel –

She has occupied space, tolerated each minute until the next one arrived, and then the next.

That anything could be bearable was a shameful minute-to-minute revelation.

The structure of the book reminded me very much of Olive Kitteridge – numerous narrators, small details that link the characters, and broad themes to provide cohesiveness. Clegg doesn’t pull it off as easily as Strout – in providing back-stories for each character, much of the emotional intensity of the tragedy is lost. This could have been avoided with fewer points-of-view – I would have been satisfied with focusing on June and Lydia (the mother of June’s boyfriend, Luke), whose stories are the most compelling. However, what Clegg does do is show us how the smallest acts of kindness – as simple as a nod hello – can be enough to allow people back into the world.

3/5 Sensitive.

I received my copy of Did You Ever Have A Family from the publisher, Gallery/ Scout Press, via NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.

Many Goodreads friends whose opinions I respect rated this book very highly, so I felt determined to finish it. Clegg is a competent writer and he does not lack insight, or plainly, life experience. Having said that, I feel the premise of the novel was far too thin to sustain its architecture. A tragedy--the death of four people on the eve of the wedding of two of them--is the premise. Clegg's set task was apparently to provide the backstory from multiple perspectives. Many of the characters (whose points of view are provided) are only tangentially related to the tragedy. This may be part of Clegg's point--the idea of six degrees of separation, if you like. The problem is, of course, that in providing so many perspectives, the author dilutes the story (which I think is thin enough as it is). At the very least, I think we readers could have safely done without the perspectives of the owners of the Moonstone Motel in Moclips where the mother of the bride retreats in grief, George (the father of a central character), and, I believe, Dale (the groom's father) who does little more than wax poetic about his golden boy son. The problem with "after-the-fact" grief narratives like this one is that the reader has not met the characters that are being mourned. Their identities are mediated and distorted through the haze of the survivors' grief. They are shadows only.
A further problem, as another Goodreads reviewer has noted, is that the actual cause of the explosion that kills the four people does not convince. It is hard to credit that someone as apparently well-off as June, the bride's mother, would not have properly maintained her home. After all, she'd had enough money to hire a groundskeeper and run off to room 6 of the Moonstone Motel in Washington state where she stays for months after the tragedy. I also had problems with the forced and unconvincing way Lydia and her son Luke's backstory came out through a telephone conversation with a scam artist.
In the end, I was not interested in Clegg's characters. I don't have a problem reading a sad story, but the melancholic note of all these characters' lives--the smog of abuse, addiction, and betrayal--hovering over the whole work felt oppressive. Had the author made more use of the stunning beauty of the Pacific Northwest, it is possible that the surviving characters, and readers as well, would have felt some sense of opening up and liberation from the claustrophobia and melodrama of family relations.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with a digital ARC for review purposes.