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A review by batrock
The Perfect Family by Robyn Harding
2.0
It’s time to stop opening books with a house fire and then cutting back to the events that lead up to the arson. It’s played out at this point. You could say that there are little fires everywhere, and we as readers need to put them out. Robyn Harding’s book has an ironic title, but that’s the only thing ironic about it. A standard issue “family in shapeless peril” story, A Perfect Family is the right choice for the entirely undemanding reader.
The Adler Family appear to be living the American dream: wealthy without being obnoxiously so, a son ostensibly in a prestigious college, and a daughter who … actually, there’s no facade there. Nobody even pretends to like Tarryn. So why is a campaign of harassment being carried out against the family’s home, and why does it seem to be escalating into potentially life threatening peril? Every member of the perfect family has a reason to be targeted, and each one of them is remaining tight lipped.
Told in alternating first person chapters focusing on each member of the Adler quartet, Harding never makes any of her characters seem like paragons of virtue or particularly evil. Matriarch Viv beats herself up over her kleptomania but still does it; patriarch Thomas’ crime is instantly white anted by the fact that he instinctively knows that he didn’t do it, and Harding didn’t bother to write him as an unreliable narrator; Eli’s own sin is pretty bad, and the self-flagellation he commits by way of atonement can only lead to one result; Tarryn … no one really knows what’s going on there.
You can take three members of the family as boilerplate, and then you can look at Tarryn. Harding is clearly not writing for anyone who’s ever used the internet, as Eli identifies his sister as a “social justice warrior” (red flag!), she calls herself “sex-positive” (to a particularly twisted value), and derides other people as “normies” (abort! Abort! Completely wrong angle, Harding!).
Tarryn’s partially incoherent plot line is a semi-reactionary warning about the dangers of “Online”, but Harding was so desperate to get Tarryn’s voice correct that every time she appears on the page she doesn’t flirt with ridiculous stereotypes so much as french them. The level of contempt that Harding seems to feel for the character is communicated viciously; if there was ever any affection for this youngest daughter in the author’s heart, it didn’t make it to the page.
Harding pushes her cipher characters through a paint by numbers plot that offers no surprises or provokes any real sort of emotional response. Ennui and suburbia are a natural combination, but Harding does nothing to rebel against this. The characters aren’t prisoners of society, but temporary self-imposed exiles looking for their way back in. And of course they will: the Adlers are as non-stick as they come, and there’s no room for social commentary here.
It all collapses into an anti-twist on the last page that is less surprising than it is inevitable. A Perfect Family is an almost serviceable but completely uninspired example of suburban pseudo-crime. If the crime isn’t shocking, the characters have to be well drawn. A Perfect Family fulfils neither brief, and its awful teen portrayal drags it firmly into safely ignorable territory.
The Adler Family appear to be living the American dream: wealthy without being obnoxiously so, a son ostensibly in a prestigious college, and a daughter who … actually, there’s no facade there. Nobody even pretends to like Tarryn. So why is a campaign of harassment being carried out against the family’s home, and why does it seem to be escalating into potentially life threatening peril? Every member of the perfect family has a reason to be targeted, and each one of them is remaining tight lipped.
Told in alternating first person chapters focusing on each member of the Adler quartet, Harding never makes any of her characters seem like paragons of virtue or particularly evil. Matriarch Viv beats herself up over her kleptomania but still does it; patriarch Thomas’ crime is instantly white anted by the fact that he instinctively knows that he didn’t do it, and Harding didn’t bother to write him as an unreliable narrator; Eli’s own sin is pretty bad, and the self-flagellation he commits by way of atonement can only lead to one result; Tarryn … no one really knows what’s going on there.
You can take three members of the family as boilerplate, and then you can look at Tarryn. Harding is clearly not writing for anyone who’s ever used the internet, as Eli identifies his sister as a “social justice warrior” (red flag!), she calls herself “sex-positive” (to a particularly twisted value), and derides other people as “normies” (abort! Abort! Completely wrong angle, Harding!).
Tarryn’s partially incoherent plot line is a semi-reactionary warning about the dangers of “Online”, but Harding was so desperate to get Tarryn’s voice correct that every time she appears on the page she doesn’t flirt with ridiculous stereotypes so much as french them. The level of contempt that Harding seems to feel for the character is communicated viciously; if there was ever any affection for this youngest daughter in the author’s heart, it didn’t make it to the page.
Harding pushes her cipher characters through a paint by numbers plot that offers no surprises or provokes any real sort of emotional response. Ennui and suburbia are a natural combination, but Harding does nothing to rebel against this. The characters aren’t prisoners of society, but temporary self-imposed exiles looking for their way back in. And of course they will: the Adlers are as non-stick as they come, and there’s no room for social commentary here.
It all collapses into an anti-twist on the last page that is less surprising than it is inevitable. A Perfect Family is an almost serviceable but completely uninspired example of suburban pseudo-crime. If the crime isn’t shocking, the characters have to be well drawn. A Perfect Family fulfils neither brief, and its awful teen portrayal drags it firmly into safely ignorable territory.