Review: The Year We Left Home, by Jean Thompson

Jean Thompson's The Year We Left Home is the multi-voiced tale of an Iowa family, told over three decades by a rotating cast of six characters.  Both parents and their young-adult children are given turns at the narration, which evolves as characters move forward to being grandparents and parents themselves, respectively.

This novel takes quite awhile to get into.  The initial characters that the reader is introduced to aren't really likable, and the tone is grey and bleak.  In fact, very often the character offering his or her perspective behaves in a manner that isn't terribly appealing, and the reader is left to find the overriding interest in the story not by focusing on one person in particular, but rather in how these flawed, damanged humans manage to relate to one another.  Once all the characters are introduced, and the family web is completed, it's a little easier to become attached to one person or another; as the characters age and become less selfish, they likewise become more appealing.  Still, however, because the family members don't deal with each other very often, it's frequently easy to forget that this is a family drama at its core.

SPOILER ALERT - SKIP TO BELOW IF YOU PLAN ON READING THIS BOOK

One serious flaw with this novel is the loss of the voice of the voice of Torrie, the bright young daughter with the eating disorder, after a terrible car accident on her way home from a funeral.  Because this novel is offbeat, and Thompson takes risks in her portrayal of characters by allowing them the freedom to be more than slightly crazy (for example, the returning Vietnam Vet with the serious inter-personal, and mental, disabilities), it would have been germaine to allow Torrie to maintain a role in the telling of the story on her own, rather than through the occasional observations of others.  People with traumatic brain injuries are not devoid of experience, and even if her voice was garbled, or childlike, this would be preferable to essentially removing her voice altogether, especially as she took dramatic steps towards independence at the end of the novel.  Prior to the accident, she was my favorite character, and her shift to inactive voice creates a large hole as far as I am concerned.  I would have been extremely interested to read her perspective on the world around her.

SPOILER OVER

Where Thompson is strong as a writer is in her constant movement forward.  She doesn't waste time coddling the reader, making sure you have kept up with the leaps forward in time.  The story is not continuous, and if the reader isn't paying attention, the book will continue on regardless, leaving her confused and needing to flip back in order to place people and events.  Like all families, some members fit better than others, and all have strong and weak points.  Thompson is unapologetic for her character's failings, until the end, where she seems to succumb to a need to tie things up neatly with a bow.  This is unfortunate, because the rest of the novel is so untidy, and a sunny ending is a bit jarring.

Overall, The Year We Left Home isn't a waste of a read, by any means, and is more male-friendly than most in the family-story genre.  The characters face real-life choices that we see friends and neighbors making daily (re-entry after war, adultry, drugs, tragedy, parenting), with varying results, and Thompson doesn't waste time with overdone, non-action-related descriptions.  This is a no-nonsense book, and the trade-off for this is that the reader doesn't spend as much time building a relationship with each character.  That, combined with the challenge that some of the characters aren't overly likable to begin with, makes it less likely that the reader will experience that can't-put-it-down feeling.

Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars.  No-nonsense, multi-voiced slow-starter describing real issues faced by a wide-spread family over a generation.