Attachments

By R.Z. Sheppard

FAMILIES by Jane Howard Simon & Schuster; 282 pages; $9.95

"When we concentrate on a material object, whatever its situation," said Vladimir Nabokov, "the very act of attention may lead to our involuntarily sinking into the history of that object. Novices must learn to skim over matter if they want matter to stay at the exact level of the moment. Transparent things, through which the past shines!"

The trick is how to walk on water without, as V.N. warned, "descending upright among staring fish." Great novelists are born with the knack. Good journalists must master it. Jane Howard is a good journalist. In fact, she is one of the best of those soft-stepping Austenian observers who seem to glide easily over a situation or a subject without leaving a distorting wake. "My way," she writes, "is to use my intuition as a compass, go where I feel welcome, stay as long as I can manage to, meet whoever is around, help them do what they are doing if they will let me, and try to remember that she who asks least learns most."

People obviously open up to Howard, sometimes at their peril. Count the bodies garroted with their own jargon in her previous book Please Touch: A Guided Tour of the Human Potential Movement (1970). Her new work is a tour of the most human of all movements, the family. She visits dozens of them around the country: a matriarchal black clan in Indiana, a tribe of patriarchal Greeks in Massachusetts, a conglomerate of patricians in Manhattan. There are Jewish families dispersed in the South and Midwest, farm families plowed over by vast interstate highway systems, single-parent families, and homes where both parents are homosexual. There are also extranuclear families--communes, and open households-- whose relationships and attitudes often seem like exotic and short-lived particles created in cyclotrons. A band in Texas "went up in a blaze of sexual hyperactivity and recrimination after about a year." A group organized around devotion to carrot-bulgur-lecithin surprise cake unglued when Frito crumbs were discovered in their beds. At an ashram, Howard is overdosed on the word "share" and honored by a guru who breathes up her nose. At a farm community she is told of a vegetarianism so strict that members wear no leather or down-filled clothing. Neither will they eat honey because it is "too heavy on the bees."

Beneath all this yinning and yanging Howard strikes bedrock: "Our capacity and need to be part of one family or another--perhaps of several--is one of the things that makes us human, like walking upright and killing for sport and bearing tools." The author herself is 43, single and childless--but not necessarily without children around her. "I am awash in that celebrated and mixed American blessing, mobility ... My nature, it would seem, is to be peripheral," she tells us. Her own ties of blood and water, her relatives, and friends who can be called at 4 a.m., run through the book like underground streams, surfacing to give an intimate vitality to the facts of other lives. For the record, the author is a Chicagoan, daughter of a journalist father and a mother who seems to have seen herself as "a kind of Madame de Stael of the farther reaches of the Near North Side." The family has Midwestern agricultural roots with an American genealogy that goes back to 17th century Virginia.

Howard can get downright misty about the traditions and places of old families: "We walked among the tombstones, marked at the feet as well as at the heads, while horses named Sundance and Apple and Spirit cantered and neighed on the hillside above us, and locusts droned around us."

On the means and ways of old money, she is observant to the point of not blinking: "There's a hotpad between each plate and the placemat beneath it; a blanket cover separates the quilt and the bedspread. Such people modulate their voices and favor sixty-watt lightbulbs, margarine, reasonably priced toilet paper, public transportation as opposed to taxis, and order. They never leave the oarlocks in the gunwales." Her ear is finely tuned to the poor. "It's kind of a family tradition for us to get pregnant in our senior year of high school," says one Northern woman. A clannish Southerner notes that "my daddy died with just enough left for a tank of gas."

Regardless of circumstances, good families appear to share similar char acteristics. Howard's list includes a strong figure around whom others cluster, an archivist who keeps scrapbooks and photo albums up-to-date, an atmosphere of continual busyness, an ability to deal directly with trouble, and a sense of affection, ritual and place. Such qualities are also useful in the making of good books like Families.

R.Z. Sheppard

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