Family Portrait

Is there anyone out there who feels like their family understands them? I mean really understands them? Most of the people I know deliberately misrepresent or omit a fairly large portion of their lives when around their families. There’s a variety of reasons, not necessarily bad: vestiges of teenage rebellion, the urge to preserve our parents’ idealized vision of us as little angels, the need to carve out an adult identity separate from our role in the family. But whatever the reason, once we’re grown up, going back home often feels weird – you’re stepping back into childhood, surrounded by all the same family members, but…you’re not a child anymore. Doing so on the occasion of a parent’s death would, I imagine, feel even more strange and disorienting.

But this is precisely what brings the McCleod family together in Three Junes. Paul McCleod, vaguely grieving over his wife Maureen (recently dead of cancer), embarks on a group tour to the Mediterranean. Against his expectations, Paul is befriended by a fellow tourist, and falls a little in love during a chance meeting with a lovely young American: in short, he’s slowly coming back to life. Still woozy with grief, Paul finds himself slipping into reveries about his marriage to Maureen, a sassy and alarmingly self-contained woman whose fierce independence kept her strangely distant from her husband and children. Through his recollections, we see Maureen as a woman ultimately uninterested in sacrificing her own pleasures for the happiness of others: thus, she unapologetically embarks on a lengthy affair, and devotes herself to raising collies while shipping the kids off to boarding school.

Six years later, in a rented house on a Greek island, Paul dies, and the adult children gather at Tealing, with spouses and children in tow, to make the necessary arrangements: Fenno, the eldest, an overeducated and fussy gay man who’s fled to New York; David, a somber and humorless veterinarian; and Dennis, an unrelentingly sweet and mild-mannered chef. Sibling rivalry rules the day, and old inter-brother tensions flare up as Fenno plays hooky from the funeral and is accused of spiriting away their father’s cremains.

It slowly becomes evident that this is Fenno’s story, as we follow him through flashbacks and learn the truth about the “wild one” who picked up and moved to another country. Sexually repressed and emotionally inhibited, Fenno makes no attempt to hide his less-than-noble motives for his often childish and selfish behavior; nevertheless, he’s a genuinely caring person, and many of his less endearing actions are rooted in his desire to love and be loved. His relationship with Malachy (popularly assumed to be his lover) is both complex and utterly convincing, a variation on his parents’ theme of a love strangled into silence but strong enough to shape lives. Less affecting is the novel’s final point-of-view change, where we’re abruptly placed in the mind of Fern, a fairly uninteresting and irrelevant character – if we were playing Six Degrees of Fenno McCleod, you’d need several steps to get to her. Her inclusion feels out of place in what is, after all, the story of the McCleod family, and weakens the book’s ending (which introduces yet another minor character in the final pages); fortunately, this is not enough to sink the entire work.

Cleanly written and resonant with emotion, Three Junes carefully portrays the dense and interwoven relationships of a nuclear family, and how those relationships change (or, more importantly, stay the same) over a lifetime. Fenno’s struggle with his family centers around his inability to believe in love without understanding: if they don’t know who he is (a result, ironically, of his efforts to keep his life a secret), how can they really love him? As we ultimately see, however, everybody plays a variety of roles in life – child, friend, lover, neighbor – and every relationship is based on an imperfect understanding of another. What matters most, and what gives our lives richness and depth, is the effort to bridge the gap and love what we know of someone. So maybe it’s not such a big deal to hide stuff from your family, after all. Particularly that incident with the butter beans, and the miniature horse, and your neighbor’s gas tank.