Newspaper Article

A loving carelessness Sue Miller's novel captures the sass and grit of family life

Reviewed by Anne Tyler, An author whose most recent novel is "Breathing Lessons"

1990

Overview

Fittingly enough, family pictures are mentioned often in \"Family Pictures.\" Nina Eberhardt, fourth-born in the large, chaotic Hyde Park household upon which this novel centers, acquires a camera while still a child and thereafter aims it regularly at her relatives, taking photos whose composition points up the family's ever-changing alliances and divisions. Sometimes their father seems the outsider-David Eberhardt, psychiatrist, observing his wife and six children from just a shade too great a remove. Sometimes the division lies between the \"giants\" and the \"extras\"-the parents and their first three children being the giants, the last three little girls the extras, unwanted by their father but wanted desperately by their mother after her discovery that the second son, Randall, is autistic. And when Randall is sent away in adolescence, the division shifts to exclude the two rebels, Nina and her brother Mack, who all at once become problems themselves as if to fill the vaccum. Then there are the photos that at first glance seem to have nothing to do with the family: the artful experiments Nina undertakes later as a professional photographer: urban playground scenes where a deliberately blurry background swirls around the subject. Her father, studying these, is disturbed all at once by a memory of 2-year-old Randall sitting impassive in a noisy Independence Day parade: \"`What on earth is wrong with that child?' a spectator asked. It was David's first intimation that all was not right with his eerily beautiful son.\"

• Publisher: Tribune Publishing Company, LLC