If You Lived Here, You'd Be Glum by Now

Model Home
by Eric Puchner
2010, Scribner


I have a rather large literary soft spot for contemporary family dramas. The modern American middle-class family, which I am privileged to have taken part in, is a very confusing and tumultuous place to come-of-age. I suppose part of this compulsion of mine has to do with a need to see my own experience somehow captured in the pages of someone else's book (my own attempts to capture it in fiction have fallen sadly short).

Model Home is a novel I read about in the Sunday New York Times Book Review and immediately requested through the miracle of interlibrary loan. While my rather adolescent hope to find a character with whom I could closely identify was stymied, there was something of my own experience in Eric Puchner's depiction of the trappings of adolescence: lusting for a more hard-edged image, sexual misconduct, a desire to project a more human face on one's parents, and a subsequent disappointment when these projections become depressingly real.

Model Home takes place in the mid- to late-eighties and features a family of five living in coastal California. The book is split into three parts, the first taking place in summer of 1985, the second a year later and the third six months after that. The plot traces the lives of the members of this family: a father who is a real estate developer, a mother who makes educational films, a son who plays in a band and lusts after his girlfriend's younger sister, a daughter who loses her virginity to a Mexican security guard, and a much younger son who exhibits troubling attention-seeking behavior like dressing head-to-toe in orange.

Puchner portrays the family as being essentially strangers to one another and yet his authorial perspective is intimate with each; chapters are written in alternating voices of each of the main characters (albeit noticeably avoiding the perspective of the carrot-colored youngest child until very late in the novel) and occasionally some of the supporting characters. Puchner is largely faithful to the close third-person voice; there were very few moments when he (accidentally) provided the perspective of both characters in one scene. In two interesting chapters, he unites the close third-person perspectives of each of these characters who are sharing a common space, producing an effect much like the climax of an Altman film when all the seemingly unrelated characters collide and interact - a nicely ironic touch considering these are members of a nuclear family.

These disparate voices are successfully captured, bringing to mind the incredibly absorbing work Jonathan Franzen did with his cast of characters in another trials-and-tribulations-of-the-modern-American-family novel The Corrections. The most compelling thing about the novel is the outright suspicion with which it treats adults. Puchner's best writing is when embracing the two teenaged children's perspectives. Puchner manages to capture the sexual frustration as well as the confusion of identity of adolescence extremely well - and especially the mistrust of adults inherent in coming-of-age.

Dustin, the son, is an extraordinarily handsome guy - but in a blandly warm way. He is eager to shake off his image as all-American surfer boy through his exploration of gritty alternative bands like the Butthole Surfers and the Stooges, mistakenly thinking that one can cultivate a worldview as simply as building a music collection. This mistake reveals itself shockingly half-way through the book when the reasons behind worldview and attitude are harshly revealed to Dustin. He is subsequently forced to confront the idea that your life experience are not something that you can fashion yourself, a truth that is perhaps obvious, but only until after you've had the chance to discover it yourself.

Lyle, the daughter, is another character developed with a sharp sense for the disappointments that coincide with maturity. Lyle is eager to partake in the adult world - she is a precocious reader - and experiments with adulthood through alcohol and sex. While this scenario is certainly not unique to either literature or life, Puchner develops carefully Lyle's fragile sense of ego with deft hands. She is defensive of her image and, like her brother, works hard to cultivate an identity. Both Dustin and Lyle care greatly about undermining their physical appearance: Lyle is embarrassed by her seeming naivete and Dustin by his approachable good looks.

The siblings both use sex as means to accomplish their quests to confound others' expectations of them. Lyle experiments with a sensitive, although perhaps unhinged, Mexican poet and when the affair goes bad, she is newly embarrassed by her attraction to this strange, broken creature. Dustin's sexual experience goes along similar lines, abandoning his generically pretty girlfriend for her twisted, self-destructive younger sister whose deceptively fragile, outwardly misanthropic edginess Dustin tries to collect her as he does his vinyl.

Their parents are portrayed with none of the same sympathetic identification which Puchner demonstrates towards the children. He writes them as self-involved and unsympathetic, particularly their father whose desperation leads him to deceptive personal and business dealings.

Moreover, Puchner does not seem as gifted in imbuing them with the same level of psychological depth. Both parents are barely developed cliches: the mother a "perfect" liberal housewife who gradually picks up chain-smoking and flirtation with European mean (to rekindle her sense of nostalgia over her lone-gone youthful indiscretions). The father is a husk of a man whose pride is ruined by his inability to provide for his family and who engages in garden-variety infidelity towards his wife.

These are obviously sketches drawn from cliche and imagined (as opposed to lived) experience, at best. (The chain-smoking mother is a particularly weak caricature.) Puchner's perspective is too closely aligned with that of the children that his development of the adults betrays an adolescent's view of parenthood.

I am reminded, for example, of the film The Squid and the Whale, where Noah Baumbach was able to heartbreakingly render the awful pain of coming of age but was unable to portray the adults in question, lacking the same kind of complicated multifaceted depth. Or, for another example, the singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright who writes so well about the difficulty of navigating the youthful quest to develop image and self-worth but whose songs about his parents remain nothing better than underdeveloped sketches, impressions of adulthood marred by lingering adolescent emotions. The portrayal of the adults in all these works are satisfactory on a surface-level only; that is, we accept the kernel of truth in them insofar as they capture how an adolescent views or imagines the adult world while remaining permanently outside it.

Compare these pieces with Rufus's father's own songs about his children, which are heartbreaking in their truthfulness, their willingness not to erect veneers to be studied but rather textured surfaces to be felt. Or, for a literary example, Philip Roth's portrayal of parenthood in American Pastoral, where the main character's uncomprehending grief regarding his daughter's violent reactionary behavior felt confused and alive and not merely studied.

These perspectives on adulthood in Model Home do not mar our enjoyment of the novel, but rather enhance our understanding of the adolescent characters and their own misapprehensions of their parents. These poor characterizations of the parents make the book and its sensitivity towards youth (and youth's struggle for adulthood) more endearing, rather than less.

The plot, while initially quite intriguing, takes a turn for the ridiculous when the youngest child runs away and begins narrating his own section of the book, where he is picked up by a mute who brings him on a Grateful Dead tour of California. This second son narrates his chapters while second-hand stoned and the grace with which Puchner endows the teenaged children evaporates in a misguided attempt to introduce, well, I'm not sure exactly - satire? black comedy?

Thematically speaking, the book plays off the image of the American home successfully. The family lives in a luxurious home, the picture perfect Southern California residence, that it can scarcely afford and which proves to be as false an image of contentedness as does the nuclear family itself. They move instead to one of their father's misbegotten model homes in the desert which is shoddily constructed and which the father had tried to sell to numerous people despite a toxic dump in the area.

There are also mobile homes that stay put and mobile homes that move with a community. It seems almost a joke that this latter "home" is really the most welcoming and communal of all; the Grateful Dead-Heads who use it are more caring and far less concerned about maintaining an appropriate image than the cast of main characters are.

Yet the point seems to be that however false aspects of these homes are, however broken the lives of these people are, they still inevitably form a family. While this family aspires for picture-perfect appearance, its failure in that regard does not dissolve the actual connective tissue keeping them together.

The strength in this book is in the accuracy with which it portrays how very distant from one another the members of a nuclear family are ("distant as satellites," the mother laments) and in the tender development of coming-of-age.

These wonderful qualities are not at all diminished by the inability to conjure up psychologically satisfying adult characters or to sustain the plot's climax without some rather confusing left-field shenanigans. Puchner, quite young as far as I can tell, has certainly has had little enough life experience not to be (thankfully) too far removed from the urgent pathos of adolescence but (unfortunately) also little enough to conjure up the anxieties of parenthood without some fair amount of bathos.