A Family Daughter

"A Family Daughter." By Maile Meloy. Scribner. $24 (paperback out 2/07, $14). 336 pages.

I hate to admit it, but sometimes I’m wrong. Really, really wrong.

Based on a few short stories that I read in The New Yorker, I thought Maile Meloy was totally overrated, although her short story collection Half in Love received much critical praise. More adulation followed for her first novel, Liars and Saints, which came out in 2003. I never read either.

When I came across a copy of A Family Daughter in the library, I decided to check it out (solely based on the book jacket copy, which mentioned entanglements “with an aging French playboy, a young Eastern European prostitute, a spoiled heiress, and her aging jet-set mother”). Within minutes of opening the book, I found myself completely wrapped up in the world of the Santerre family.

A Family Daughter revolves around Abby Santerre and her complicated relationship with her family, especially her mother Clarissa and her uncle Jamie. In some ways, the novel is a coming-of-age tale, but in other ways, it is a postmodern examination of the very genre. Abby writes a novel about a fictional family similar to hers. As the publication of the book begins to change her real family’s lives, Abby feels suddenly responsible for every twist and turn in Meloy’s work.

The plot unfolds at a breezy, rapid pace. Things happen so quickly that I caught myself rereading passages to figure out what, exactly, had just happened — did Jamie really just have sex with that girl? Did that person really just die?

But this pace is part of the novel’s charm. Within the first 25 pages, Abby’s father has died. Ten pages later, she’s involved in an incestuous relationship that comes across as sweet and sexy instead of creepy, a testament to Meloy’s skill. Over the next 300 pages, relationships come and go and come back and evolve in completely unpredictable ways that are alternately hilarious and heartbreaking.

The entire novel is a reworking of Liars and Saints, which tells the story of the Santerre family from a different perspective. Since I haven’t read that novel, I can’t compare the two. All I can say is that A Family Daughter is one of the two best books I read in 2006, along with Claire Messaud’s The Emperor’s Children. Undeservedly overlooked, I hope the paperback edition of the novel in February will bring it the attention it merits.