A Southern Family

by Gail Godwin

After Theodore Quick, twenty-eight, and his girlfriend, Jeanette, are found dead with all the evidence pointing to Theo himself, his family must reevaluate itself

Genres: Fiction, Southern, Family, Relationships, Book Club, Classics, Literary Fiction

595 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1987

About the author

Gail Kathleen Godwin is an American novelist and short story writer. She has published one non-fiction work, two collections of short stories, and eleven novels, three of which have been nominated for the National Book Award and five of which have made the New York Times Bestseller List.

Godwin's body of work has garnered many honors, including three National Book Award nominations, a Guggenheim Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts grants for both fiction and libretto writing, and the Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Five of her novels have been on the New York Times best seller list.
Godwin lives and writes in Woodstock, New York.

Reviews

[Cynthia · Rating 2 out of 5]

I thought the author wrote very well, I just wasn't into the plot. This book starts with the family coming together for their mother, Lily's, birthday. Only it is not a happy occasion but is filled with this undercurrent of tension, anger, resentment, and subtle jabs at each other. The next day, the older son Theo kills his girlfriend and then himself. The family is shocked and doesn't want to believe he could do something like that.

The book looks back on some stories about Theo and family times. However, it never reveals clear cut reasons for Theo's traumatic actions, now does the book reveal clear reasons for the family's emotional estrangement from one another. While I wasn't expected a neatly wrapped ending, after reading 500 pages of these family observations, I wanted to draw some kind of conclusions of why this family was so emotional dysfunctional. I kept wondering why these people stayed with each other.

One good thing--this book made me glad I not only love my family, but I also like them too.

[Kay · Rating 5 out of 5]

A dense book that has to be read slowly. I first read it in 1988, but it seems quite different in 2020 in light of the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement. The first time, I was absorbed in the trials of Lily and her daughter Claire, as well as Theo, the brother who kills himself early in the novel. The family dynamics are still maddening and fascinating and outrageous. Nevertheless, on second reading, what strikes me is aspects of Southern culture, black and white, middle class or poor, and attitudes toward history that escaped me back then.

For example, Lily's second husband Ralph, remembers being taken on a hunting trip as a young boy and witnessing the way his father and uncles torment the black servant they have brought along to cook for them over the weekend. The men consider it hilarious, a highlight of the trip, repeated year after year. Looking back on it as an adult, Ralph reflects:

"I come from people who were glad to have somebody between them and the bottom, from people who were too new to society to go about defying it or helping to change it. It's no good, my looking down on my father or pitying him for being what we now call a "racist redneck." ...There is no cause to congratulate myself or feel I've surpassed him because I treat all my construction crew the same, whether they're black or white, and because I don't balk at sitting down to dinner with Theo's black friend, LeRoy; every middling member of society, which is what I am, does that now, because it's what everybody DOES.

And then there is Snow, Theo's wife, who left him to live in a trailer in her family's collection of dwellings high in the mountains of Appalachia. In an attempt to understand Snow, Julia (a history professor at the local college) decides to visit Snow on her home turf. She gets quite a shock:

"...but Claire, usually inclined to hyperbole rather than understatement when describing something bad, had not prepared her for the demoralizing impression of the junkyard radiating out from the center of the patriarchal compound.... In several spots, the mound of debris rose higher than the house. Julia's heart constricted from the sheer insolent ugliness of it. There was nothing funny about it. It could only be laughable to someone who had no connection to it or who was insensitive to its implications. It could only be "interesting," without pain, to the sociologist types or rural snoops in search of picturesque proof to substantiate the "orneriness of the hillbilly"or the horrors of poverty. But this wasn't just orneriness or poverty. It was something much worse; it was visible and tangible evidence of a cluster of attitudes that, if shared by enough people, could bring down civilization: apathy, blindness to beauty, a refusal to be responsible even for your immediate surroundings.

All of this resonates quite differently now under a Trump presidency that has whipped up a cluster of attitudes that, if shared by enough people, could indeed bring down civilization.

[judy · Rating 3 out of 5]

No one does character studies better than Godwin. This time, she lets several characters give their reactions to a shattering family event in their own words. From these complex characterizations, we need to decide who these people really are, why they do what they do and why they didn't do it differently. In short, this is a book in need of a book club. The rating is three stars because I felt she left too many gaps in the development of several key characters. The book is over 500 pages. Giving me what I wanted might have taken 1000.

[Mary Cassidy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another brilliant Godwin novel. To me the most interesting stylistic innovation in this book is that she has a writer character, one of the southern family of the title, challenged by a half brother because she manages to work everything out for her characters in the end and that he would not want to be a character in her novel. And then he is killed, kills, commits suicide, it is left up in the air, and it seems he has made it impossible for the novel to resolve it. But in a fascinating way, it more or less does. Read it to see how. Read it for the joy of reading a great novel!

[Margie Ferguson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Favorite line regarding southerners "Their politeness is a very effective form of agression"

[Dolores Wendland · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderful writer. Would like to reread

[Adri · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent characterizations. Loved this book, and love Gail Godwin's writing.

[~mad · Rating 4 out of 5]

still reading - 5.26.18 - made it to pge 405 of 540.

Couldnt go any further - have books from the library that mUST be read and returned.


Very wordy

[Paula Cox · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found this to be a boring read. It took me a while to get through it.

[Daria · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was on my mother's shelf at Inverness. I remember really enjoying Gail Godwin's "Father Melancholy's Daughter" so I took this one home. I just loved seeing what my mother underlined and the notes she made in the margins. She had an airline boarding pass inside so I know she read the book in 2002 and was on her way from Steamboat Springs.

Having lost Shannon to suicide I recognize how everyone in Theo's life looks for signs that something was amiss. They imagine ways they could have intervened. I think that poor Theo felt alone in the world from the start.

As with other Gail Godwin novels religion plays quite heavily in this. This book was really such a comfort. I finished this book two days after Pippi went over the rainbow bridge.

[Barbara · Rating 4 out of 5]

this was a truly insightful look into the psyches of people and their struggle for existence.

[Leah Keating · Rating 2 out of 5]

When the Quick family gathers to celebrate Lily’s birthday, they are unaware of it being the last time they will be together as a family. The family reunion turns tragic as Lily’s oldest son, Theo, is killed. As the family copes with the details of Theo’s death, they each begin to question if they had been a good enough mother, father, brother, or sister. With each family member stepping through the stages of grief, they realize the impact Theo has had on their lives and continues to have through his death. Gail Godwin draws the reader in to the Quick family in a truly southern way. Describing the family history of Lily and Ralph and their desire to rise above their station and make something of themselves. We even see Lily’s daughter, Clare, struggle with her family’s past and the history of the south as she writes her novels. Godwin addresses family trauma, history, and living with grief with such delicacy that her characters seem nonplussed by the tragedy that has struck their lives. Personally, I feel as though I read about the Quick family and I’m not sure these people learned anything by going through such a tragedy as Theo’s death. Even though Godwin’s writing is smooth and seemless, I was constantly turning the page hoping to understand why I was reading about the Quick family. Theo’s death feels unresolved. Even though his family is in shock that he would do such a thing, after their stages of grief they seem to go on living as if Theo had never been part of the story to begin with. Godwin’s characer development is somewhat lacking, they ask plenty of questions, but without any answers or change to the faults they find in themselves.

[David Hinton · Rating 2 out of 5]

I bought this book when it first came out (yes, that long ago). Started to read it....quit. Kept it around all these years intending to read it but never did. Endless times I set it out in my pile of books to go to my local used book store for trade-in credit and each time I took it off the pile and put it back on the book shelf---because I have liked every Godwin book I've read and because, well....I live in the south and I should read it.

Finally six months ago after retrieving it from the pile once again I resolved that I was going to read the book. I actually got to page 305 (out of 507) and just couldn't go any further. Like others have said, the story line didn't appeal to me, the characters didn't appeal to me, and the family's dysfunction seemed too endless repetitive.

Gail Godwin is doing a reading/signing at Nashville's wonderful independent book store Parnassas Books (co-owned by author Ann Patchett) next Monday, just a few minutes from my house. I'm going, and bringing along my First Edition "Violet Clay" for an autograph. And of course I will buy her new book.

And "A Southern Family" finally makes the trade-in trip.

[Olivia · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm a big fan of Gail Godwin's books but I wasn't crazy about this one, mainly because a lot of the characters were unlikable. But I appreciate that there is truth in that for if we all had books written honestly about ourselves, our lives, and our experiences we might not all come out looking good. There was also presence of sadness throughout the book that I found hard to stomach.


"I come from people who were glad to have somebody between them and the bottom." Page 158

[Rick · Rating 2 out of 5]

What is it with 2025? Give me a break already! If you are expecting a powerful, classically written epic novel with vivid descriptions of hardship and family dynamic, you're looking in the wrong place. This is a huge, well-written novel, but with a plot as thin as fishing thread. This behemoth of a novel is unbearably slow with very little reward in the end. You've been warned

[Martinxo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not sure what to think of this book, I was tempted to give up a few times but I finally made it to the end. Overall I feel a little let down by the whole thing.

[Bamboozlepig · Rating 1 out of 5]

It's a bit confusing and the prose is a little overblown. I've tried to read it once before and it just never jived with me.

[Bonnie Brody · Rating 4 out of 5]

Claire, a middle-aged author, living in New York, returns to her home in the south, and attempts to come to terms with her brother's suicide and her alienation from her family. She both loves and hates them and can not extricate herself from the emotional turmoil that each visit brings.

The novel centers on her brother, Theo, who commits suicide. There is also Theo's ex-wife, Snow, a mountain hill-billy woman who sues Theo's parents for custody of her son, Jason. Lily Quick is an aging southern belle who must maintain a decorum of inner sanctity despite any emotional upheavals in her life, including a destroyed marriage. Ralph Quick, an outsider to himself and unable to relate to his wife, Lily, because of the guilt he has carried with him from an early love affair is well characterized. Claire tries to understand her family's patterns of circuitous communications and how they mislead one another, acting like characters in a play that they themselves are authoring.

"Oh what a charade. Each of them piling up points against the other - - for whose benefit? And yet, since they've become their own audience, for the most part, the game's ante seems to have risen. Wounding retorts are sharpened, their stings savored in advance. Each has become so cunningly vigilant, lying in wait for the other to 'act in character'. Knowing someone all too well, without affection or charity, can be a vicious weapon". (P. 446)

As Claire tries to navigate the stormy seas of her family, it sometimes appears to be a recipe for a shipwreck. I am a fan of Gail Godwin and also recommend her other novels, The Finishing School (Ballantine Reader's Circle) and Violet Clay: A Novel.

[Nicole · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was good but not excellent for me. 2011 was slow book reading for me, I just could not get into the story. The story line is good but at times it was hard for me to follow and, I hate to use the word, bored. Hence, slow reading for me but I was determined to finish it and I did January 4, 2012 and I started it sometime in February 2011. It never takes me this long to finish any book but this one, for me, was very slow reading. This the first book by this author that I have read and I am not sure I will look for any more books by her. If you like reading about families and their functional/disfunctional existance, then this book is for you.

[Marion · Rating 3 out of 5]

I ploughed my way through this novel which is very detailed story about a dysfunctional southern family raging with personal grudges, self destruction, and family denial.

The author artfully weaves both class, gender, and racial tension throughout the story line and manages to lobb a few jokes along the way as well.

The characters are believable based on my exposure to various aspects and elements of southern society.

I do fault Godwin with long windedness--the story could have been preserved within a 300 pp. format.

[gaudeo · Rating 3 out of 5]

A thorough look at a family following the death of an adult son/brother. I can't say I ever warmed to this family or experienced any "aha" moments. The writing is solid. Not a particularly memorable book, though, I'm afraid.

[Dottie · Rating 3 out of 5]

A first edition hardcover for 10 cents today from the outdoor shelves at the main library! YES! Godwin being one whose works call me back semi-regularly I am most pleased to have this volume on my shelves. It is in quite good condition also.

[Josephine Ensign · Rating 1 out of 5]

A hot, tangled, complex mess of a book. Kind of like most southern families that I know, including my own. Perhaps that is why I did not like this book, but I think it had more to do with the fact that it is a decidedly dated 'women's fiction' book.

[Jessica Gettel · Rating 2 out of 5]

There were moments I thought this would redeem itself, but it was a tangled nonsensical plot and a waste of SIX HUNDRED pages. I have to finish books o start but I would avoid this. No pay off whatsoever

[ruzmarì · Rating 2 out of 5]

I like Godwin's style and her simultaneous flares for dialogue and place-centered-ness, but found this novel forgettable.

[Marilyn · Rating 2 out of 5]

Excellent character developement but not a very happy book. It is like peaking into the windows of house in your neighborhood that has never been quite right.

[Shari · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read this book several years ago.

[Sharon · Rating 2 out of 5]

Abandoned this one pretty quickly. Seemed trite.

[Mary Sewell · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very good one.

[Lynette Lark]

Dysfunction is so southern.