Bingo: Family. The entire book revolves around the protagonist’s families and her place in them.
Polly is happily married to her husband Henry and a content mother. Her own family is patrician and oppressive, a very tight unit that has enfolded Polly her whole life. In both of her families Polly is reliable, uncomplaining, giving, and steady. Which makes it all the more surprising when she finds herself in a passionate love affair with an artist named Lincoln.
The intense love between Polly and Lincoln initially absorbed me, and made me realize that I haven’t read anything romantic all year. It was a nice change of pace. Polly equally loves her over-worked lawyer husband, with whom she has always felt content and right. But Polly is starved for her husband’s attention and suffocated by her withholding parents, who expect her to be perfect without caring who she really is. Polly finds herself torn apart by her secret double life, wracked with guilt and desire in equal measure. For Polly, family has always been everything, and she easily slotted herself into its knowable structure.
My feelings about Family Happiness went up and down. I found the love affair rather entrancing, and appreciated that Polly also loved her husband and her family life. The characters were well written, if a bit on the surface, and there was a gentle humor to the story. However, as Polly plunged into despair about not wanting to lose her family but also knowing Lincoln was a loner who might never be able to make full room in his life for her, I started to get impatient with the character. For dozens and dozens of pages Polly is mopey and dramatic; she is wildly needy and cries all the time. I know one of the main points of the book was the value of life as messy and complex, and that Polly has not truly lived as her authentic self safely wrapped up in family life. But Colwin drags us through every feeling Polly has, both anguish and love, and I felt a bit suffocated myself.
Overall, this book was a quick and relatively absorbing read. I can’t say I enjoyed spending time with the protagonist, but her story kept my interest, even with its faults.