Novel showcases search for long-lost family member

Searching for Caleb is a book that focuses on relationships among generations of the Peck family of Baltimore.

While it is lively narrative all the way – author Anne Tyler was the 1988 winner of the Pulitzer Prize – no reviewer could do justice to the individuals she chose to tell her story as she makes her characters both individually distinct, interactive and thematically representative.

The Peck family, with three exceptions, is what in New England we call “Bostonian,” expressing strict social standards, questioning any other kind of behavior. Caleb – of the title – a musician since childhood, one day, picked up his guitar (nothing else) and walked down the driveway of his family’s house with a goodbye wave.

His brother – now an old man – travels with his granddaughter, Justine, following even the slimmest lead trying to find him.

Justine finds she has a gift for telling the future, a novelistic device which exposes some of the choices – right and wrong – that people make. She was also lucky enough to fall in love and marry her fourth cousin, Duncan – the only other original thinker among the Pecks.

Duncan, however, has what we might call a fatal flaw. He becomes enthusiastic about various kinds of endeavors sequentially, moving Justine and their daughter from place to unexamined place.

Justine accepts these moves, but their daughter is made so miserable (one of these is just before she is to graduate from her high school) she cries much of the time and elopes with the first man who shows an interest in her – to find that she’s in an even worse family situation.

The story is not the important element; the events reflect the people who experience them and thus kinds of life, three dimensional points of view, contrasting attitudes and ways of speaking. I had an occasion to read the first section of another novel recently and from the first page it felt “made up” – clearly a story.

In this novel the circumstances may be manufactured, but the feelings, the characterizations and the kind of happenings are for real – there’s no mistaking the difference.

Was Caleb found? One must read this excellent novel to find out.

Book info: 
Searching for Caleb
By Anne Tyler
Ballantine Books, $12

Posted by Rae Eastman on July 18, 2013. Filed under Arts and Entertainment,Book Reviews,Columns,Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry