DID TOLSTOY REALLY BELIEVE that happy families are all alike and every unhappy family different from each other? Carlos Fuentes's new story collection not only takes its title and epigraph from Tolstoy's famous opening lines to Anna Karenina, but also makes us reconsider its truth.
Happy Families: Stories
By Carlos Fuentes Translated by Edith Grossman
Bloomsbury, 352pp, £16.99
Review by FRANCINE PROSEAdmittedly, the households at the centre of these 16 stories could hardly be gloomier or, on the su
rface, more dissimilar, as each labours under its own burden of grief. Yet as we read through this offering from one of Mexico's most celebrated writers, certain patterns emerge, likenesses suggesting that the wildly dysfunctional may share more in common than do their harmonious neighbours. The closer your family is, Fuentes seems to suggest, the greater the chance you'll sustain psychological damage.
Possibly the most useful lesson to be extracted from Happy Families is that it's smart to stay single. Among the most contented characters are bachelors: Leo, who in a pair of stories turns out to be having simultaneous affairs with two married women, and the elderly traveller in "Sweethearts", a regretful ballad of lost love.
The hero of "A Cousin Without Charm" destroys his marriage when, to amuse his cherished wife, he invites a group of relatives to visit, and the ugly spinster-cousin turns out to be hot. The bond that links a homosexual couple in "The Gay Divorcee" falters when they take on a sort of adoptive son, a serpent who reveals and widens the fault lines in their supposedly Edenic relationship.
Throughout, one senses Edith Grossman – the expert translator who made the language of Don Quixote newly accessible – working to persuade us that a character could deliver a line like "My speciality is launching penury in pursuit of wealth," or to find lucidity and originality in observations that are either gnomic and incomprehensible or, alternately, sententious and obvious: "The storm of nominal and adjectival scorn that poured down on Mexican homosexuals perhaps only hid, crudely, the very disguised inclinations of the most macho of machos: those who deceived their wives with men and brought venereal disease into their decent homes." Even with Grossman's help, it's hard to read the poems narrated in collective voices ("Chorus of the Children of Good Families", "Chorus of the Rancorous Families" and so forth) that separate the stories and that, in several instances, provide sensationalistic recountings of the massacres of the peasants at El Mozote and elsewhere.
How troubling to realise that the author of Happy Families is the same one whose novel The Death of Artemio Cruz was suffused with so much complicated humanity. Perhaps what's most troubling about the new book is that we are so often made aware of what can only be a gap between intention and execution, between Fuentes's apparent desire to inspire empathy for his characters and the way we're made to feel contempt and even repulsion for these inadequate fathers, ageing wives, oppressed peasants and philandering husbands, for the decrepitude of the old and the impotence of the helpless. Too often, the construction of the plots and the rendering of the characters seem simply inattentive or lazy, and there are hints of the telenovela, though not, it would seem, deliberate ones.
So we come full circle to Tolstoy. If Fuentes makes us impatient with those we're supposed to support, Tolstoy set out to condemn his adulterous heroine and ended up being swept away in a torrential compassion for every family, happy and unhappy alike.
Obviously, it's unfair to measure Fuentes against Tolstoy. But if you're worried about your next novel being compared with Melville's, think twice before calling it "Moby-Dick." Ultimately, though, none of that matters very much. The problem with Happy Families is neither its title nor the fact that it isn't by Tolstoy. The problem is that we sense these stories are getting something wrong. And that makes us question how much energy Fuentes has put into creating a world we can believe in.
• Francine Prose's novel Goldengrove (HarperCollins, £14.99) is out now.
The full article contains 689 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
